Why would Dr. Wardynski continue paying (with the limited funds that the district has) for something that he could get for free?

I thought we hired him for his financial acumen. (Of course, he’s often proven that he’s willing to pay a premium for things that he wants. He’s done it with Teach for America and with The Pinnacle Schools.) He’s always willing to spend money on his pet projects or to return some money to Eli Broad, but our teachers’ salaries are after two years still frozen. Our starting teachers still make the state minimum.

Since Huntsville City Schools began using STAR testing to evaluate teachers in September 2011, Dr. Wardynski and the Board of Education have paid Renaissance Learning, Inc. (the owners of STAR Enterprise testing) $541,011.50 for formative testing software that the Alabama State Board of Education will provide to our district for free.

On July 31, 2012, Dr. Sherrill W. Parris sent a memo to every City and County Superintendent in the state telling them that the state was offering them “unlimited free access to unprecedented test management solutions” to help in “assessing students on relevant content in Alabama’s College- and Career-Ready Standards in Kindergarten through Grade 12.” (You can read the memo from Dr. Parris yourself here.)

So since July 31, 2012, we’ve paid Renaissance Learning $244,773.59 for access to the STAR Enterprise test when the state was providing a similar formative testing system for free.

Which raises the most important question of all: Why?

Dr. Wardynski has said that “we do STAR. We like it best.” He’s made this claim knowing that there are other options like GlobalScholar and also knowing that GlobalScholar is free.

So why?

Why would our district spend a quarter of a million dollars on something that the state would have given them for free?

Through what process did Wardynski evaluate STAR Enterprise to determine that the district “likes it best?”

Why, exactly, does he “like it best?”

Could it be that he likes it best because he controls it? He controls the way it’s administered. He controls to whom it is administered. He controls what data points will be used for evaluations.

And he controls the scores themselves.

You see, the STAR Enterprise test is currently being used in our district to evaluate teachers rather than students. He is picking and choosing data to reward some teachers, principal and schools and to punish others. He’s used the data to require that some principals force their teachers to participate in additional professional development. And he’s using the data to terminate others. As he claimed to The Huntsville Times 47 teachers were not renewed based on “principal recommendations, student growth data, classroom observations, teacher attendance, student discipline and, for teachers in Grades 3 through 12, surveys completed by the students themselves.” (Yes, those evaluations that 8 and 9 year olds completed despite the fact that many of the questions made no sense to them, those evaluations that were wide open to the general public, were used to determine if 47 teachers were renewed or not.)

Since we’re using STAR rather than GlobalScholar, Wardynski has complete control over how the data is used, and what the data shows without any oversight from the Alabama State Board of Education. If he used GlobalScholar, the data would be subject to their review.

Then he might not be able to so easily use one single data point to claim that a teacher hasn’t shown growth. Then he might not be able to easily alter or order others to alter their data to “look better.”

If he used the state’s free test, he loses control.

And he can’t have that.

Even if it costs him a quarter of a million dollars of someone else’s money.

The post A Quarter of a Million Wasted on STAR Testing appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Most of what you’ve heard (or will hear tonight) about testing, or “Quality Core” assessments and the amount of time being consumed by it is completely and demonstrably wrong. In fact, testing has replaced nearly all instruction at the elementary levels, including even one of Dr. Wardynski’s favorite activities: Physical Education.

At the beginning of April, Dr. McNeal offered the following report on the amount of time that would be spent at the end of the year on testing. Her claim that evening was that all the assessments that the district would be engaged in over the coming month and a half would amount to absolutely no more than 8% of a student’s time.

If you’d like to watch her presentation, you may view it below:

If you’d prefer the transcription, you may read their discussion below:

Dr. McNeal: Evening. Uh, we’ve talked about this last board meeting about the assessment cycle because we’re beginning to enter it. And many questions have been asked about how, of all these tests, these tests we’re giving, how, how much time does it take each student at a different level of the instructional time that we have during the spring.

So, if you look, we’re already testing right now. We’re doing the ACCESS, and the alternative assessment will start April the 15th. Then we move on to ACT Quality Core. We’re giving 12 of those. Uh, we’re participating in the ACT Aspire in grades 3-10. That is a pilot. It is going to be, it’s going to be recommended to the state board our new ARMT test. We are part of the pilot, so all of our students in grades 3 through 10 will be participating. In, by the way, ACT end of course and Aspire are online. So they will be taking it with their individual computer.

We have AP exams going on. And then we have our STAR test. And then finally, at the very end, in grades 3 through 8, we have the Alabama Reading Math test, which is the plus version now. And this will be its very last year.

Dr. Wardynski: Cathy if I could just chime in here for a minute? So the ACT Quality Core Course Assessments are new this year. Um, the state is bringing those on over a few years. We’ve brought them all on at once. The reason we’re doing that is for a variety of reasons, most important is we will now have formative information throughout the year of how our students are doing in key subject matter areas in secondary education. The STAR assessments have been very helpful to us in primary education with regard to reading and math. Um, but when you get into Biology, Chemistry, History, there really is nothing there that is aligned with what the country’s doing, what our kids need to be prepared to do. And it gives us insight well ahead of that final test. With the quality core, we have formative assessments we can give to know if we’re on track for the children to be successful so we can make course corrections. Uh, the quality core assessments are aligned with where our country’s headed, which is college and career ready [AKA: Common Core].

Um, we have a waiver from our state that allows our students, if they pass these assessments, they will get a high school diploma, even if uh, and they don’t have to take the high school graduation exam other than for the simple purpose of No Child Left Behind, um, meeting those requirements.

So our kids now have two ways to get a high school diploma. They can take the high school graduation exam and pass, or they can take the ACT Quality Core exam and pass. [Ed. Note: His use of the word “or” implies that students can choose. They cannot. The district is requiring that students take both exams this year.] And, um, with the Quality Core exam we get a lot more insight on how prepared they are for college, and how well we’re doing as educators to get them ready. [Again, note the dual justification. The second one is actually the main one.] And so that’s a new battery of assessments. Um, our teachers have been going through the training all year long for this. Um, a lot of work going on there.

Dr. McNeal: Um, the Aspire test is a pilot, but we will be getting individual student responses back similar to the end of course that we can use for next year. So, we’re not paying one penny for that pilot, yet we will be getting data on each end of the, sort of like each end of course for grades 3 through 10. That will provide us additional data per student. It’s quite valuable data for us as instructional leaders. [Ed. Note: She doesn’t explain or offer evidence supporting this claim.]

Dr. Wardynski: If I could just add one comment there: If you’ll notice three letters sort of dominate: A. C. T. And ACT is sort of the benchmark for getting into a college. College’s use that to understand if a child is going to be prepared to be successful in their first year of college education. Our goal is for our students to leave here ready to go to college, if that’s their choice, and not need remediation the first year. It’s a state goal as well. And so, lining things up with ACT is that sort of alignment we’re after. So, ACT test to get into college. ACT Quality Core Curriculum in secondary education will line up with that to prepare our kids. ACT Aspire program to replace Alabama Reading Math Test to prepare our kids in those early years for the quality core, and for the ACT assessment. So, things are really starting to line up. And this is critical because there are still discussions in some quarters of our state about the common core, about things that originate outside Alabama. Uh, and if we make any move away from this, we’re going to be making a move away from preparing our kids to enter college and succeed that first year. Everything is now lining up. Uh, education across our country is lining up with a target, and we don’t want to deviate from that.

Dr. McNeal: Well, in looking at how much time we’re taking for these assessments, I looked at grades 3 through 8. We have 24 days between April 22 and May 23 so that’s actually 168 learning opportunities or classes. So if I take a typical 3rd grader through 7th grader, they take the ARMT test, which is really a four-day test, so that’s taking 8 periods. They take the ASPIRE which is a one day test lasts two and a half hours, which is three periods. Then they’ll take the STAR reading and math formative assessment at the end. And they, at the most, take 45 minutes, from the average for us it takes 20. So we’ll say 2 periods. So, basically of those 168 learning opportunities, assessment only has taken 7.7% of that time. So all the other times we’re still having learning opportunities toward May 23rd. Because actually this year is the first time where the ARMT assessment will be right up to the very end.

Dr. Wardynski: Of worth noting is, of that 7.7% of that time available for student education, the majority of it is taken up by something that’s going away called ARMT.

Dr. McNeal: Yes.

Dr. Wardynski: The new assessments take much less time.

Dr. McNeal: Um, an 8th grader is a little bit different because some of our 8th grade students this year will be taking ARMT. If they’re taking algebra or geometry, we have quite a few taking algebra I, they will also be taking the end of course for the ACT this year. So we will have end of course testing for 8th grade. So that takes about another 1% of their time, so if you’re an 8th grader and taking algebra I, basically about 8.8% of your time will be spent in assessment between those 168 learning opportunities.

And when we look at high school, high school, the last week of school is their exams this year. And uh, so we high school really leaves the learning opportunities May 17th and they go to exam periods. So when I look at a 9th to 10th grader who is taking the ACT, taking two end of course tests, they’re going to take the pilot, the Aspire pilot, if you’re in 9th or 10th grade because our 9th to 10th graders will also be taking the pilot. They’ll take the STAR test, and basically that’s 7% of the 9th and 10th graders’ time. And most likely, about two, an English and a math course test is what they would take in 9th or 10th grade.

Now when you move on to the 11th or 12th graders, they might have for example, they’ll take the ACT end of course, in this case I showed an example of someone taking the end of course for history and English, but taking an AP math test. Just one math. So that’s a math, history and an English, so that’s about still 7%. But if they’re taking two APs and two end of courses, that’s only 8% of their time. So you can see when we’re looking at the end of course, it takes roughly one day, two 45 minute periods and it will be online, and they’ll take 45 minutes, 10 minute break, take the next 45 minutes. It’s over with, so it takes roughly 3 periods only to take the end of course. And if you’re taking, 3 times 2 would only take up to, uh, 6 of the hours for a 2 day period.

So you can see that we’re not, the most we’re taking is 8.8 times for a . . . The one that is taking the, the 8th graders who is taking algebra I will probably be the one student taking the, spending the most time in assessment. And there are, so in high school, if you’re taking in 3 AP courses you’re not going to be taking an end of course test. This year, you’re not taking both. This year if you’re taking AP English, you won’t be taking the end of course test because you’ll be taking the AP English.

So you see, the idea that our students are spending a solid month to even six weeks testing is just wrong, according to the district.

Only 8% of the instructional time is dedicated to testing.

Except that it’s actually far, far more than that.

This Ain’t a Perfect Testing World

All of those estimates are based on the best possible scenario. When, even once this year, has the best possible scenario taken place when computers were involved?

Exactly.

This 8% doesn’t take into account students not being able to get online because the network just can’t handle the load.

This 8% doesn’t take into account students who aren’t even testing being ordered to turn off their computers to free up bandwidth for those who are testing.

This 8% doesn’t come close to a real world experience.

Ask your kids: What, other than test, have you done for the past three or four weeks?

There’s your actual estimate. Other than perhaps lunch, no one in this district has done anything other than test (or specifically cram for the test) for the past four weeks.

Six and a Half Months of School

Instead of 8%, of the remained of the school year, that number is far closer to 100%. If you want to look at the entire school year, then you come to the number that excluding the STAR test (which some of our students are taking weekly), the vast majority of our students are spending close to 12% of the year taking standardized tests.

Combine this number with the at three weeks of instructional time lost to computer issues, and the STAR taking up to 30 minutes a day (or again nearly three weeks) for some students test and suddenly a 9 month school year is far closer to 6 and a half months.

And that, again, is the best possible scenario.

ACT Failures

Remember when Wardynski was singing the praises of A.C.T.? He said:

If you’ll notice three letters sort of dominate: A. C. T. And ACT is sort of the benchmark for getting into a college.

Well it seems that ACT has been having a horrible month all over the nation. In Kentucky, Indiana, Minnesota and Oklahoma, “computer glitches” have caused a derailment of testing.

Guess what? Those same issues caused problems here in Alabama as well.

The Alabama State Board of Education voted on April 11th to adopt the ACT Aspire test as a replacement for the ARMT+ testing claiming that ACT Aspire was “fully aligned” with the common core. (It seems that they’ve forgotten the plus sign at the end of ARMT+. That plus sign was supposed to indicate that ARMT was also now “fully aligned” with the common core as well. If there’s one thing you should take away from this is that common core has certainly introduced a proclivity to change our assessments at the drop of a pencil.)

Despite Wardynski’s and McNeal’s claims that the ACT Aspire would dramatically reduce testing time, the exact opposite has taken place.

Over the past few weeks, schools all over the district were scheduled to take the ACT Aspire as a trial run for when it will become the standard next year. McNeal claimed that this test was a “one day test lasting two and a half hours.”

I do not know of a single classroom that was able to complete the Aspire test in this amount of time. When students first began taking this test two weeks ago in fact, entire classes would sit in either computer labs (because the 3rd grade netbooks are garbage), or in their classrooms taking turns attempting to log-on and take the assessment.

At the end of the day, on average, about half of a class might have been successful in taking the exam.

Wardynski talked about this a bit during the May 2nd board meeting:

And I heard some, I think we got some twitter stuff. Some stuff on Facebook about, we heard, you know testing is taking longer than expected.

So, the way Dr. Wardynski hears about testing abnormalities is via Twitter and Facebook? I guess his plan to keep all negative news from reaching his ears has worked fairly well, huh. Not one director, principal or teacher picked up a phone to let him know that it was taking twice and three times as long? Not one director, principal or teacher called him to let him know that entire grades were not able to actually take the test at all?

It’s a good thing the board decided to leave the communication goal out of his evaluation last year, isn’t it?

But since he’s at least hearing it on the internets, let’s see what his response to it taking longer than expected was.

So what does the testing look like?

Wait, what? I don’t think that was the actual question, Dr. Wardynski.

Well the students do it one their laptop. Uh, there’s a piece of software that’s deployed to the laptop by ACT corporation called VanGuard.

That’s right, ACT has access to your child’s school laptop.

VanGuard is designed to lock down the environment so we’re not doing scree shots. And we’re not emailing them to our buddies. We’re not texting answers around, any of that. The dom, the environment’s locked down for testing. And um, VanGuard is controlled by ACT. Well we have very bright students. And some students figured out how to penetrate through VanGuard.

He said this with a big, proud grin on his face.

And we alerted ACT, and that led to some delays and some people gathering on airplanes to come down here and stuff like that. Uh, and uh, that’s all part of the teething pains. ACT’s teething pains. Uh, on our end our students take about 45 minutes to take the first component. They get a ten minute break. Take another 45 minutes. If they have a computer glitch, they get a re, they get an adjustment, and um if they have a total problem, they get a chance to make up. Now this year, we’re doing this ahead of the state. Um, so that gave us the option of doing it the way we wanted to do it. So for students taking these exams, if they have a complete disaster for some reason, they have a bad day, whatever, um, there’s no negative consequence.

Remember, Dr. Wardynski thought that there were “no negative consequences” from

1. Students wasting educational time due to ACT’s failure to create a secure testing environment.
2. Students hacking into the a secure testing environment.
3. Students as young as 3rd grade sitting in a computer lab all day while teachers run around, under threat of their certification being revoked, attempting to fix computer issues while making sure that the students are primed to take a test.

This is what he means by “gave us the option of doing it the way we wanted to do it,” I suppose.

This is what he had to say about ACT Aspire testing on Thursday, May 2, 2013.

My daughter, after a long week of ARMT+ testing from Monday, May 6th through Thursday, May 9th, was for some insane reason, scheduled to re-take the ACT Aspire test on Friday, May 10th.

Hopefully all of the testing issues with our world class student hackers had been resolved a week after Dr. Wardynski claimed that they were fixed on Thursday, May 2nd.

Except that test that’s supposed to just take, according to Dr. McNeal, “two and a half hours” actually took six.

That’s right, a week after Wardynski had fixed everything the half a day test still took an entire day.

We really should just start doubling and tripling every cost estimate that Wardynski offers us.

Negative Consequences for Student Learning

What are the negative consequences for students? For starters, there’s significantly less time for a teacher, in a class of 27 third graders, to actually teach. As a result, subjects like science, social studies, history, art, music, and even physical education are shoved aside so that the subjects being tested most often are stressed most often in class.

During the week of testing from May 6th to the 10th, no third grader in my daughter’s school even had time for PE.

Yep, even in Alabama, where sports are God, we cancel PE in service to the test.

It’s time to bring this insanity to an end.

It’s time to opt out and return teaching to our schools.

The post Canceling PE In Favor of Testing appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Tonight the Superintendent had an hour on stage all to himself to describe for us what he believes the state of the schools is. He, of course, took no questions from the few dozen citizens who bothered to attend.

In his never-ending “transformation” drumbeat, he continued to claim that our students, as the Times reports, “have to be prepared to deal with questions we can’t even imagine today.”

Like all sales people who are trying to push off on the public a product they know to be substandard, Wardynski’s words sound good until you actually take a minute to think about what he’s saying.

Let me ask you, what exactly is the purpose of education if not to prepare students to deal with questions we can’t even imagine today? He truly does seem to be of the opinion that he is the first person to ever think of this.

Astonishing isn’t it?

And again, like a sales person hawking a lemon, he used statistics from the first nine weeks of school to again push his agenda that computers in the classroom have eliminated every discipline across the district.

In-school suspensions were down 42 percent in the first nine weeks of school, Wardynski said. Out-of-school suspensions were down 49 percent and total suspensions were down 45 percent.

I wonder, does he think that we don’t know that we’re actually in the fourth and final nine weeks of the school year? Hey, Dr. Wardynski, these statistics weren’t believable the first time you were pushing them. There even less believable now.

If you actually care about the state of the schools, here’s a suggestion: quit listening to the superintendent’s snake oil pitch, and try visiting any one of the schools in the district.

Look in the eyes of the teachers, and you’ll know the state of the schools.

Look in the eyes of the support staff, and you’ll know the state of the schools

Look in the eyes of the students, you know the entire reason the schools exist, and you’ll know the state of the schools.

Teachers Flee

Or if you are just a numbers guy, as the superintendent likes to call himself, try these on for size.

Since September 2012, 191 people have voluntarily left their positions with this district.

That number, by the way, includes the Elementary Teacher of the Year.

And the time when most people make a decision to leave a school system is still in front of us. That number will easily double by the time August rolls around because of one simple fact: everyone who can get out is getting out.

There isn’t a single week when I don’t hear from another teacher who tells me that they’re looking for a job, any job, outside of Huntsville City Schools. And the teachers I’m hearing this from are among the best in the district.

Students Flee

If you want another number: in 2011 the district had an Average Daily Membership (ADM) of 23,155.80.

In 2012 that number fell to 23,140.35 despite a growing population. That’s a loss of a mere 15.45 ADM.

In 2013, however, that number fell to 22,811.10.

That’s a loss of 344.7 students since Wardynski started.

Anyone care to look at the enrollment figures of the private schools in this town?

• Randolph School in 2007: 825
• Randolph School in 2010: 937
• Randolph School in 2011: 997

Notice a trend? Heck, even the one school board member with school aged children has his kids in a private setting.

Wardynski flight, indeed.

The state of our schools is frightening, but no one at the Wardynski love fest talked about that.

The post The State of the Schools: 191 Volunteer to Leave appeared first on Geek Palaver.

For the past month, I’ve been discussing opting out of the final STAR Enterprise assessment of the year with both my daughter’s principal and later with Dr. Cathy McNeal, whose title is Director of Research and Development but who is really is the new director of testing in the district. It hasn’t been a fun, or even a particularly polite (on the part of Dr. McNeal) discussion, but it has been eye-opening to see the level of disdain that our district has for parents who dare to ask questions about district practices.

It isn’t just the superintendent who refuses to have discussions with parents; he’s passed this practice on down to his district staff as well. In the end, thanks to a principal caring more about the students than a “policy,” we were able to get things resolved.

Here’s the story so far.

On March 30th, I wrote a post about the cheating scandals in Atlanta and pointed out how we’re ripe for just a scandal here.

WAFF contacted me on Tuesday of that week wanting to do a story about potential cheating here in Huntsville. I was told that the district was refusing to discuss the possibility, and that they wanted to run a story about it anyway.

I agreed to be interviewed about the possibility of cheating, and the end result of the interview was that the district made Lee Simmons a “curriculum specialist” with ties to Westlawn and the “phenomenal” growth there available to be interviewed. She claimed that cheating on the STAR test was “virtually impossible,” as there would be 30 different screens with 30 different questions all at the same time.

Except, of course, that doesn’t make cheating “virtually impossible” at all. All a teacher needs to do to improve STAR test scores in her classroom is assist the weakest student with the test, or, as has been documented, give the student the same test, every week, until they begin to improve.

Ms. Simmons seems to be a dedicated teacher, but she’s incorrect when she claims that cheating or modifying scores is “virtually impossible.” There are dozens of ways it could be done.

This is one of the reasons why I decided it was time for my child to opt out.

Opt Out: Start With The Principal

I like and appreciate Dr. Summerville. Overall, I believe that she has done a good job in an impossible situation, and it would seem that the Alabama PTA agrees as she was just named Principal of the Year.

As I know that teachers have absolutely no input or control on what assessments occur in their rooms any more (and this is just the beginning of the issue, isn’t it?), I went to Dr. Summerville to discuss my daughter opting out of the fourth time she’s taken the STAR Enterprise tests this year. That’s right, my girl, just like every other child in this district, has taken the STAR test three times already. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15% of the students in the district take the STAR test every single week until they begin to show improvement on the test.

And that’s another issue that I have with this test. Rather than spending more time reading and working harder on understanding mathematical concepts, the district’s solution to a student who doesn’t show enough “growth” on the STAR test is to give that student the STAR test again.

And again.

And again.

We’ve been in school for about 28 weeks so far. Some of our students, the students who need the most help and assistance with the reading and math, have taken at least part of the STAR test each week during those 28 weeks.

We test until the results are where the superintendent wants them to be because that’s his understanding of what education is all about.

I’m sorry, but how, exactly, does this benefit the child who is struggling? How does it benefit the child who isn’t struggling when the teacher’s attention is entirely focused on administering a test to a group of students for the 15th time?

And so I asked that my daughter be allowed to opt out of the final STAR Enterprise assessment of the year because it is not improving her educational experience.

I was informed by Dr. Summerville, in a generous and caring way I might add, that she had been informed that this was not a possibility.

As our principals now have nearly as little influence on the direction of their schools as our teachers do on the direction of their classrooms, I thanked Dr. Summerville for her time and took my case to the person who said no: Dr. Cathy McNeal.

Opt Out: The District “Responds”

After informing Dr. Summerville that I would pursue this discussion with the district, I emailed Dr. McNeal to ask her to allow my daughter to opt out of the final STAR Enterprise test.

On April 9th, I wrote Dr. McNeal expressing my concerns with my daughter taking the STAR Enterprise test:

Dr. McNeal,

I’m Russell Winn. As I suspect you are aware, I have recently met with Dr. Summerville, my daughter’s principal at Mt. Gap, to request that she be allowed to opt out of the final STAR Enterprises test of the year. I have been told that this is not possible, but I have not received any justification for this position which disregards parental concerns over the education of a child.

I am requesting that my daughter be allowed to opt out for the following reasons:

As far as I have been able to determine, there is zero educational benefit to [my daughter] in taking this test again as she has taken it at least three times already this year (not counting the time that has been spent preparing her for this exam). I still hold this view despite speaking with Dr. Summerville for over an hour on Monday about this. In fact, I am now even more convinced that my daughter is not benefiting educationally from taking this test.

Thus, I am again asking that my daughter not waste her time taking the STAR Enterprise test any further this year, and I am requesting an explanation of your decision to exclude parental wishes from the educational process.

I would appreciate receiving this information in writing from you, but I am also willing to meet with you if you so desire.

My daughter is currently scheduled to take the STAR test during the week of April 29 – May 3 [The test has been moved up to April 24-25 due to a test scheduling issue. Yes, we test so often at the end of the school year that we have difficulty scheduling everything]. I would appreciate reaching some resolution on this matter before that time.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Russell Winn
256-457-2887

On April 10th, which was a fairly rapid response for someone working in the central office, Dr. McNeal responded:

The Alabama State Department of Education prescribed that a formative assessment be administered in all schools and school districts during the 2012-13 school year. The formative assessment is relevant in assessing students and preparing them for Alabama’s College- and Career-Ready Standards in Kindergarten through Grade 12. The STAR Enterprise formative assessment platform is a valid measurement of the curriculum and provides a pacing guide for each individual student’s learning progression. Opting out of the mandated curriculum is not a choice.

Cathy C. McNeal, Ed.D.
Director, Research and Development
Huntsville City Schools
256 428 6966
mary.mcneal@hsv-k12.org

Notice, the district’s first response to my request for my daughter to opt out was to blame the Alabama State Department of Education, and to imply that ALSDE required that students take the STAR test as the formative assessment that the teacher and district uses to determine where a student is as the school year progresses.

Formative/Summative Assessment

There are two basic types of assessment that teachers use. Both are useful and important to determining a student’s mastery of the material. The kind that most of us are familiar with is known as Summative Assessment. This is the test that is given once instruction has ended to determine mastery of the material. Formative Assessments are given before instruction on the material has ended to see if the student is mastering the material.

Think of the two like this:

Summative assessment is the spelling test that is given on the spelling words at the end of the week. The teacher gives out words at the beginning of the week for the student to learn to spell. The test on Friday where the teacher calls out a word, and the student writes the word (spelling it correctly) on a sheet a paper is a summative assessment. If the student spells the word correctly, they pass.

Formative assessment in this scenario would be the homework that a teacher gives to the student to assist learning the words before the summative assessment on Friday. Let’s say that the teacher assigns the students sentences to write with the spelling words for homework. When the student turns in that homework the next day, the teacher can assess formatively how well the student understands the word and whether or not the student is learning to spell the word correctly. The homework may, or may not, be graded. The purpose of a formative assessment is to inform the teacher how well the student is mastering the material. If a student is struggling on a formative assessment, ideally, the teacher will notice and adjust her or his instruction to assist that child in mastering the material before the summative assessment is given on Friday.

I say ideally for one reason: in a classroom with 27 third graders, one teacher has a difficult time individualizing instruction to keep both the student who is mastering the words and the student who is not engaged.

Nothing can be individualized 27 times.

And a standardized test, like the STAR Enterprise test, is the exact opposite of individualized instruction.

Sure it shows that the student is reading on a 9th grade or 2nd grade level, but when one teacher has a class of 27 students all reading at different levels as varied as seven separate grades, where is most of the attention going to go?

It’s going to go to the student reading below grade level because that’s how the teacher is being evaluated: by the weakest student in the class.

And will the teacher be allowed to use her training and expertise to help that struggling student? No. There just isn’t time because the student has to take the STAR test again at the end of the week.

Passing the Buck

You’re starting to notice a pattern here, aren’t you? No one wants to take responsibility for telling a parent, especially a parent who is such a trouble-maker like me, no. So, let’s blame the other guy.

Dr. McNeal, following Dr. Wardynski’s lead on April 4th decided to call the STAR Enterprise test a “state mandated test.” She, like Dr. Wardynski before her, has absolutely no evidence to support this claim.

Here’ s what the superintendent had to say about me and the STAR test on the 4th:

First, there’s what I would call idol debate. Um, there’s a “watchdog” apparently who thinks we shouldn’t do STAR testing. We don’t have a choice. Formative testing is part of the state now. You’re either going to do GlobalScholar or some other formative assessment. And we do STAR. We like it best. But if we weren’t doing STAR, we’d be doing GlobalScholar or something else. A debate about formative assessment’s not even a debate.

You may watch his comments below:

The superintendent likes to make claims that sound good, but for which he offers no evidence, and which, as it turns out, simply aren’t true.

Yes, the state does what districts to perform formative assessment. That’s completely true. Guess what, that’s been completely true since long before the superintendent even knew that he wanted to be a superintendent.

As I explained above, formative assessment can be as specific as a homework assignment.

What the state does not require, despite Wardynski’s claims to the contrary, is standardized formative testing. Neither does the state require the use of STAR Enterprise’s tests.

The state might require this at some point in the future, but it is not required now. Either our superintendent doesn’t know what he’s talking about (which is highly possible), or he was exaggerating what is currently required by the state.

Here’s a copy of a memo that was posted to the ALSDE site in September 10, 2010 that lists the requirements that a local district (LEA) should follow if, and only if the local districts chooses to administer formative testing like the STAR Enterprise test. At the writing of this memo, the state does not require formative testing such as the STAR test.

Since much changes in two and a half years, is there anything more current than this on the ALSDE site? Why yes, there is. On July 31, 2012, Dr. Sherill Parris issued another memo about formative, interim, and benchmark assessment. It is, in fact, the only official mention of formative, interim and benchmark assessment on the site that is in a directive format. The memo is entitled: Statewide Formative Assessment, and the opening paragraph reads:

Most, if not all, of you have heard that the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) will be providing a statewide option for formative, interim, and benchmark assessments beginning August 2012. Through a rigorous, competitive application process, GlobalScholar, Inc, was determined to best fit the needs of what our state is attempting to accomplish.

You’ll note the use of the word “option” in this paragraph. And you’ll notice the complete absence of any indication that formative assessment is now a state requirement. Guess what, if you bother to read the totality of the memo, not once will you find any indication that the state currently requires local districts to perform formative assessments.

(Oh, and this is a thought for another time, but can someone explain to me why we’re paying nearly half a million dollars a year to Resnaissance Learning for something that the state would give us for free?)

Finally, if you read your 2012-2013 Student-Parent Handbook, you’ll find on page 21 that the STAR test is listed as a “District mandated” test. It is specifically not listed as a “State mandated” test. The handbook also states:

The HCS Mandated Assessment Program for the school year 2012-13 will include:

Grades: 1-12 STAR Enterprise Math and Reading (3 to 4 benchmarks during the school year) STAR Enterprise Math and Reading Growth percentile will be included as a percentage of the student’s grade each 9 weeks for those students who show growth.

The handbook claims that this is a district mandated test that will be required “3 to 4 benchmarks during the school year.”

The state doesn’t currently require local districts to do formative assessment via a standardized tool such as the STAR Enterprise test. The superintendent and Dr. McNeal are mistaken if and when they claim that the state requires this type of formative assessment.

It’s Time To Opt Out

After all this round about, this “idol debate” as the superintendent likes to claim, I finally  arrived at a few conclusions:

1. The District is not using the STAR Enterprise test to actually perform formative assessment on my daughter. My daughter has show growth in all three of the assessments she took this year, and yet despite the district’s claims in the 2012-2013 Student-Parent Handbook quoted above that the growth percentile “will be included as a percentage of the student’s grade each 9 weeks for those students who show growth,” my daughter’s “growth” has not be included as a percentage of her 9 weeks grade. (In fact, when I asked about this, no one in the district seemed to know this was included in the handbook. Perhaps we should make the district sign the handbook showing that they’ve read it next year.) In other words, there is no evidence that the STAR test is impacting my daughter’s grades.
2. The STAR Enterprise test has not been used to modify my daughter’s education this year. My daughter is in a classroom with 27 other third graders and one teacher. This class was specifically designed to include both higher and lower performing students in the same room so that neither (yep, there are only two 3rd grade classrooms at Mt. Gap despite there having been three 2nd grade classrooms a year ago) third grade teacher has a class of just higher or lower performing students. Even if the district were pushing teachers to actually use the data found in this assessment in any way other than to cut and paste the information onto another report they’re required to fill out, (yes, that is exactly what happens with the report showing what your child “knows”), there would be no physical way a single teacher could individualize instruction for 27 3rd graders in a single class. It is not possible.
3. The STAR Enterprise test’s only purpose is to evaluate teachers, principals, and schools. The test doesn’t exist to help your child. It exists to abuse your child’s teacher. That’s all.

As such, I decided, after talking with my daughter and wife, that our girl should choose to opt out of the fourth and hopefully final STAR Enterprise test of the year.

The District Has Rights Because We Say So

When I informed Dr. McNeal of my decision she wrote (on April 11, 2013) the following:

The Huntsville City School System through its superintendent has the right to mandate tests.

That’s right, Dr. McNeal was convinced that despite my telling her that I do not want my daughter to waste her time taking another test that offers her zero educational benefit, that she would assert the rights of the district and the superintendent to overrule my wishes as my daughter’s parent.

In response to this assertion of district rights, I wrote the following:

I find it interesting that you choose to close by asserting the rights of the district and the superintendent, Dr. McNeal. You may be correct when you claim that “The Huntsville City School System through its superintendent has the right to mandate tests.” You haven’t actually provided any evidence of this, but you may be correct.

However, the rights of the parent to be an active participant or “partner” (as the student-parent handbook calls us), in my child’s educational process, are not subsumed to the rights of the superintendent or the district.

Parental rights take precedence over the superintendent’s rights when it comes to the education of my daughter. He does not have the right to force my daughter do to something that I will not allow her to do, including testing.

Dr. McNeal, I have attempted to address this in a respectful way that acknowledges that you (as a representative of the district) and I are partners in my daughter’s education. I have asked that my daughter be allowed to opt-out of the final STAR benchmark of the year. I have provided with you my reasons and justifications for requesting this. I have followed up by asking for evidence that supports your claims that this is a state mandated test.

You have responded by asserting that the rights of the district outweigh my rights as a parent when it comes to my child’s education.

Are you certain that you do not wish to reconsider this position?

I remain interested in discussing this with you further. If you can offer me a convincing justification that my daughter’s education will benefit from taking this assessment, I will reconsider my position. So far your response has amounted to “because we say so,” and frankly, that response is inadequate.

At the present time, my daughter, XXXXXXXX, does not have permission to participate in the STAR Enterprise reading and math benchmark assessments for the remainder of the 2012-2013 school year.

Sincerely and respectfully,

Russell

Russell Winn
256-457-2887

As I would imagine it is needless to say, Dr. McNeal offered no convincing justification that my daughter’s education would benefit. She would once again simply offer the reasoning that we could not opt-out of the test simply because the district “says so.”

Cutting and Pasting Responses

A week later, I wrote Dr. McNeal back again to see if there had been any change in her opinion concerning my request that my daughter be allowed to opt out of the STAR test that she’s already taken three times.

Rather than engage me in an honest discussion, Dr. McNeal chose to basically cut and paste her response to me from an earlier email assuming, I suppose, that I had not responded to this email once already. So much for being partners with our schools in education.

She wrote, for a second time:

As stated in the original April 10, 2013 e-mail response to this request:

The Alabama State Department of Education prescribed  that a formative assessment be administered in all schools and school districts during the 2012-13 school year.  The formative assessment is relevant in assessing students and preparing them for Alabama’s College- and Career-Ready Standards in Kindergarten through Grade 12.  The STAR Enterprise formative assessment platform is a valid measurement of  the curriculum and provides a pacing guide for each individual student’s learning progression.   Opting out of the mandated curriculum is not a choice.

As stated in the Huntsville City Schools Student Handbook 2012-13 pg. 21 and referred to in your e-mail dated April 11, 2103:

STATE MANDATED ASSESSMENT PROGRAM 2012-2013

The State Mandated Assessment Program for the school year 2012-2013 will include:

Grade(s) Assessment

• 3-8 Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test + (ARMT+)
• 5 & 7 Alabama Science Assessment Grade 5 and Grade 7
• 3-8 & 11 Alabama Alternate Assessment
• 3-12 ACCESS for Limited English Proficient (LEP)
• 8 EXPLORE
• 10 PLAN
• 9-12 Alabama High School Graduation Exam (Fall, Mid Year, Spring, Summer)
  • *No student takes all the tests listed above, nor is all day devoted to testing on the specified number of days.

 The possession of a digital device (including but not limited to cell phones, MP3 players, cameras, or

• other telecommunication devices capable of capturing or relaying information) is strictly prohibited during

the administration of a secure test. If a student is observed in possession of a digital device during the

administration of a secure test, the device will be confiscated.

 If a student is observed using a digital device during the administration of a secure test, testing for the

student will cease, the device will be confiscated and is subject to search, the student will be dismissed

from testing, and the student’s test will be invalidated.

HCS MANDATED ASSESSMENT PROGRAM 2012-13

The HCS Mandated Assessment Program for the school year 2012-13 will include:

Grade(s) Assessment

• 1 – 12 STAR Enterprise Math and Reading (3 to 4 benchmarks during the school year)
  • STAR Enterprise Math and Reading Growth percentile will be included as a percentage of the student’s

grade each 9 weeks for those students that show growth.

• P – 1 STAR Early Literacy (4 benchmarks during the school year)
• 9 – 12 ACT QualityCore End-of-Course Assessment for the following classes:
  • English 9 English 10 English 11 English 12
  • Algebra I Algebra II Geometry PreCalculus
  • Biology Chemistry Physics U.S. History.
  • The QualityCore grade will be included as a percentage of the student’s final grade for the course for

those students that show growth

Cathy C. McNeal, Ed.D.

Director, Research and Development

Huntsville City Schools

256 428 6966

mary.mcneal@hsv-k12.org

Honestly, why would someone even bother cutting a pasting a previous response that had already been debated? But since she did, I wrote her and my daughter’s principal on final time asking them to allow my daughter to opt out of the fourth and hopefully final STAR Enterprise test of the year.

The district is nothing if not repetitive.

It seemed that the question would be decided on the day of testing, which had been scheduled for the week of April 29th.

The School Changes Its Mind About Trumping Parental Rights

When my daughter told me on Friday, April 19th that the school had moved the STAR Enterprise test dates up a week, and that they would happen tomorrow and Thursday rather than next week, I again wrote to my daughter’s principal to confirm.

She chose to respond by calling me back that evening. During our brief and friendly conversation, Dr. Summerville told me that my daughter would be allowed to opt out of the final STAR Enterprise test this year. She didn’t want to “make a big deal about this” and that she didn’t want me to check my girl out of school.

It is decisions like this one that help to explain why she is the PTA Principal of the Year this year. It’s a shame that we don’t have more educators like or (or more educators in general) at the district level. They could learn a lot from watching Dr. Summerville.

So after a month of passing the buck, after a month of the district leadership–including Dr. Wardynski as you saw above–claiming that they don’t have any control over what tests our kids are forced to take by the state, after a month of the district claiming that their rights supersede a parent’s rights to determine what is best for their own child, the school decided to do the right thing.

For this I am grateful. I only wish it hadn’t take so long.

The first STAR test is scheduled to be administered tomorrow with the second to follow on Thursday. I am hopeful that the school will keep its word and not attempt to test my daughter.

The TakeAway

So what does all of this mean for you and your student?

First: I am not suggesting that you opt your child out of any test based solely on my experiences. If you believe that your child is benefitting from taking a test multiple times, then you shouldn’t do a thing. Allow the district to administer the test to your child.

I am not attempting to tell you what is right for your child. I am simply relaying to you the processes that I have followed with this district.

Second: Should you decide that your child should opt out, you cannot take “no” for an answer. They will tell you no. They will tell you that if you keep your child home on testing day, that the test will simply be administered upon their return. They will tell you that the state mandates the test. They will tell you that the district mandates the test. They will tell you that the district’s rights to test your child out weigh your rights and responsibilities as the child’s parent.

Simply put, unless you have been ruled unfit to be the legal guardian of a child, no one has the right to force your child to do anything that you do not wish for your child to do.

Please remember, I am a teacher. I am not a lawyer. If you want or need legal advice, please hire a lawyer. All I am relaying here are what I believe to be true. Now, I am, of course, convinced I’m right on this matter, and I believe that the school has finally agreed to not test my daughter supports that idea. But you should make up your on mind on the matter.

Tomorrow will mark our first step to taking back our schools. The superintendent, the board of education and the district leadership like to believe that this is their school system. Every time Dr. Wardynski makes an executive decision, as he is doing with the rezoning issue, he demonstrates once again that the public doesn’t matter in public schools in his mind.

This is our district, not his. And opting out of this abusive, waste of time test, is a good way to show him this.

The post Parents May Opt Out of Testing appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Since posting the Children Evaluating Teachers post Sunday night, there have been several details to come to light that need your attention.

Despite a district representative’s claims to the contrary, I have been told that these evaluations from eight-year olds have indeed been used during the evaluation process of non-tenured teachers at the end of the year last year. In other words, the results from a non-scientific survey of eight-year olds has been used by the district to decide if a non-tenured teacher should be allowed to continue teaching another year.

The District “Exaggerates” the Truth

When the district representative wrote, “This information is not used to evaluate teachers,” this person was either completely misinformed or attempting to spin the truth of the situation to appease an upset parent. These surveys of children are absolutely used to evaluate teachers.

Furthermore, I’ve heard from several other concerned citizens and teachers since posting. The consensus is that the district is absolutely using the opinion of children to evaluate teachers. They are even using these opinions when, as this teacher shared, the students are clearly using the evaluation to work out their frustrations with the teacher:

Evaluating the Huntsville City Board

In response to the completely reasonable and accurate survey that the district had our eight-year olds filling out for their teachers, a friend of mine has created a similar survey asking for your opinion of the superintendent and the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education. This is your opportunity to share your opinions about the board’s and the superintendent’s responsiveness to the students, teachers and public.

The survey will be open from now until April 28, 2013, so please take a moment to go and offer your assessment of the board and the superintendent. There are a total of 28 questions, and your participation is completely anonymous. (On this matter, I give you my word. If you share honest opinions, no one will ever know that you were the one to share them.)

If you have a connection to Huntsville City Schools, please take a few minutes out of your time over the next two weeks to share with us your opinion of the board of education and the superintendent. When the survey is closed, I will share the results of the survey here.

You may access the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HCSBOESURVEY2013. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. Please share the survey with everyone you know as well.

Thanks y’all. Together we can turn this ship around before it sinks. I’m convinced of this.

The post Evaluating the Huntsville BOE and Superintendent appeared first on Geek Palaver.

I was planning to write about my adventures in opting out of the STAR Enterprise test next, but it seems that the board and the superintendent with the assistance of The Huntsville Times reporter Challen Stephens has decided that today, without any prior public discussion of the issue, was a good day to announce to the city that we should “Get Ready for the Rezoning of Huntsville City Schools.” As such, the discussion of opting out will have to wait a day or so.

Today Mr. Stephens, as a mouthpiece for the superintendent and the board of education, told the city that, “it’s time to redraw school zones throughout Huntsville.” He went on to write:

But change itself should not come as a surprise. Huntsville almost two years ago hired a retired Army colonel to fix its school system, and the board made a point of asking him to end the 43-year-old court order to desegregate city schools. Rezoning is a small part of the plan to do just that.

It’s a shame that Mr. Stephens decided to reprint what basically amounts to a press release from the board announcing this as if the decision has long since been made about rezoning. But he went further by claiming that no one should be surprised by this necessity because we all knew this was coming when we hired Wardynski and the board made achieving unitary status one of his priorities.

This sounds awfully good on paper; it’s a shame that there’s so little truth in this statement.

No Mention of Rezoning

You see, I’ve attended all but three board meetings held during Dr. Wardynski’s tenure. The three that I missed, I watched from home or on the DVD recordings available from ETV.

I’ve heard every single public discussion concerning unitary status that has occurred at a board meeting. Every single one. And you know what, not once since Wardynski was hired has there been a single public mention of rezoning during a board meeting.

Not one single mention.

So, I’m not sure what Mr. Stephens is basing his claim that “change itself should not come as a surprise.”

When the district, when the superintendent specifically state that rezoning will not occur, I’m sorry, but it does tend to come as a bit of a surprise, no matter how the Times might wish to spin it.

Wardynski Told Public No Rezoning

On January 14th, Dr. Wardynski met with the public to discuss moving Grissom High School to a new location just behind Sam’s Club on South Parkway.

During this meeting, Dr. Wardynski was asked a question about rezoning that he responded to fairly (for him, anyway) directly.

Q: Are you considering rezoning with the new Grissom?

A: No. If there is [any rezoning], it will be for currently zoned students, not transferring students.”

Dr. Wardynski went on to say that he “will not have students transferring across town – students will go to new schools at Johnson or Butler in their home school zone.”

As I said, for him, this was a fairly direct and to the point response to a direct question. It’s a shame that Mr. Stephens was evidently unaware that Wardynski had long since told us that there would not be any rezoning of Grissom High.

So yes, it does indeed come as a surprise that rezoning is now being presented as a necessity.

And really, since evidently not even the board has seen the final plan (which is nearly impossible to believe, by the way), I do have to ask how Mr. Stephens knows that “Rezoning is a small part of the plan to do just that.”

And again, if the board hasn’t seen the plan yet (as the article claims), how does Mr. Blair know that “the current plan would not rezone Blossomwood into Lee High?” How does he know that “I think Huntsville High stays pretty strong” (quite a reassuring endorsement, isn’t it)? How can Dr. Robinson claim, “I’m not seeing anything that gives me a great deal of concern?” (And really, can anyone name anything that Wardynski has done that has given Robinson “a great deal of concern?”)

What we have here is another attempt by Wardynski to use “the press” and the board of education to push his agenda on the city without any public input at all.

Even though there has been zero mention of rezoning in a public meeting, even though Dr. Wardynski himself assured the public at the town hall meeting that there would be no rezoning, we’re already being told that anyone who has a problem with this “plan” simply hasn’t been paying attention.

It seems that it is instead the Huntsville Times that hasn’t been paying attention. Isn’t that actually the only job the paper has? Shame they refuse to do it.

This is Our City. These are Our Schools.

This city belongs to us, the people. It doesn’t belong to the Huntsville Times. It doesn’t belong to the Huntsville Board of Education. It doesn’t belong to Dr. Wardynski. It belongs to us.

It’s time to remind Dr. Wardynski, the feckless board of education, Mr. Brooks and the Times that this is our city.

If you wish to do this, you may wish to speak during the public comments section of the board meeting scheduled for Thursday night at 5:30pm. If you wish to speak on this or any issue, you have to sign up before the meeting. The easiest way to do this is to email Debbie Jennings the Superintendent’s secretary at debby.jennings@hsv-k12.org. Tell her that you would like to be placed on the citizens’ comments list representing yourself to speak to the issue of rezoning.

You should demand to see the rezoning plan. You should insist that the public have input into developing the plan.

The district employees and the board of education work for us. They owe us specific answers without pushing for acceptance of the “plan” before we’ve even seen it.

The post Rezoning Without Involving the Public appeared first on Geek Palaver.

This past week, across the district, and at all grade levels, children as young as eight-years old (3rd grade) have been told to take yet more time out of what’s left in the year to fill out an evaluation on their teachers. Our children are evaluating our teachers.

Once again, following the failing lead of other “reformers” across the nation, (you know, whether they produce results or, as in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., not) Huntsville has picked up the practice of having children evaluate their teachers.

You see, on Tuesday, my child came home from school worried. She had been asked to fill out an evaluation on her classroom teacher, her S.P.A.C.E. teacher, her P.E. teacher, and even her librarian, and she was worried that she might have answered some of the questions wrong. In all she said that it took her class about 45 minutes to complete these surveys on everyone. Since she was worried about her answers, I asked her if she could remember any of the questions. She could remember a few, but more importantly, she remembered the web address of the survey which was: www.research.net/s/XN26PWD (The survey is now closed, thank goodness, but it was open for the majority of the week and could be accessed by anyone from anywhere.)

So we typed it in and found this.

(Yes, my daughter has the ability to remember obscure web addresses, especially when they bother her and she has to type them in numerous times. Just imagine how much fun she is to be around when I forget that I promised to bring her something!) By the way, one small benefit of the computers is that you can check your child’s history to see what they’re doing on the computers during school each day. It seems that it might be a wise thing to start doing so.

Here are the questions she was asked to answer about three of her teachers and her librarian, each of whom she adores.

1. expects students to work hard in this class.
2. explains difficult things clearly.
3. we learn a lot almost every day.
4. we learn to correct our mistakes.
5. makes lessons interesting.
6. checks to make sure we understand what s/he is teaching us.
7. creates an environment where students feel safe.
8. enforces the same rules for all students.
9. are [sic] positive with students.
10. spends a lot of time practicing for the state test.
11. call [sic] students by their names.
12. makes me feel that s/he really cares about me.
13. really tries to understand how students feel about things.
14. greet [sic] students when entering the classroom.
15. give [sic] students opportunities to speak up and share their ideas about classwork.
16. maintain [sic] eye contact with students when talking with them.
17. respects my ideas and suggestions.
18. Are you tutored outside of school to help you learn this teacher’s subject?

She was worried that she had answered number ten, in particular, wrong. You can see how confusing it would be for a nine-year old, can’t you? After all we’ve been told repeatedly that our teachers aren’t teaching to the test, yet now students are being asked if their teachers are doing exactly that. She was also worried that when we work together each night on her homework that she was being tutored outside of school.

Of course, most of these questions do not apply to either her P.E. teacher or her librarian.

(And really, would it kill someone in the central office to proofread the surveys before posting them? The subjects and verbs of your sentences really do have to agree in number and person.)

What’s Not Wrong With This Survey

Surprise! Nope I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to ask a student for an opinion/assessment of a teacher. I’m a teacher myself. There is absolutely nothing that I value more than my students’ assessments of my teaching. When a student tells me either directly or indirectly that something I did in class just didn’t work, I listen.

You see, that’s what teaching is: listening to your students and modifying your pedagogical approach according to their responses. If I look up and see that the class is nodding off during an 8:00 am class, I’ll change my approach to the class to help them gain the most that they can from the class. When I get that look of complete bewilderment from a student, I pause, back up, and ask them what they are having difficulty with. When I see the light bulbs clicking on, I cherish the moment and ask them to share their understanding with the class so that maybe more lightbulbs will light up.

I even look forward to the formal assessments during the semester when students take a couple of minutes to fill out a questionnaire like the one above.

But then again, I teach adults, and it isn’t necessary for the proctor of the survey to explain to my students what question 16 means, and that they don’t have to answer “Sometimes” just because I once had an eyelash in my eye when they asked me a question once. Unlike 3rd graders, adults are usually slightly less literally minded.

Getting student feedback can be useful to a teacher, but this feedback does not need to be assessed by the district. The teacher could develop an assessment like this on her own and give it to a partner teacher to administer one day. The feed back would be far more useful than the responses above.

What Is Wrong With This Survey

They’re asking adult questions of children.

Most of the questions on this survey are fairly standard. Does the teacher have high expectations of the student? Does the teacher explain things clearly, or make class interesting? These are all good questions to ask a student about his or her teacher. Honestly, I often ask similar questions of my daughter when she comes home. I want to know what she thinks of her teachers. Her opinion does matter.

However, her opinion is still the opinion of a child. As such, despite my complete trust in her (she’s earned it), I do not base my opinion of her teacher on the answers that she gives me one day during the year. She’s a child. If you ask her at 8:15am if her teacher expects her to work hard in the class, she would might say no because she had just aced the spelling test for the week. Ask her again at 1:45pm after a math quiz that she hadn’t prepared for, and you’ll get a completely different answer.

This is, at best, a single snap-shot of an opinion of a person whose opinions change moment by moment.

One size doesn’t fit all.

This is the same survey that the district sent to both 3rd graders and 8th graders. I’m fairly certain that it is the same survey that was given to 12th graders as well. Children’s minds and how they process information change as they grow older. What an 18 year old understands is not the same thing as an 8 year old understands. So a throw away, simple question about eye-contact that an 18 year old would answer quickly, an eight-year old must struggle over as she thinks back to every single time the teacher has spoken to her.

This is particularly true of special education students. And in case you are wondering, yes, special education teachers were evaluated using this survey as well. Imagine how a child on the autism spectrum might answer the question about eye-contact?

Furthermore, can someone explain to me why we’re asking students if their P.E. teacher or librarian spends “a lot of time practicing for the state test?”

A poorly designed assessment tool will usually produce poor and unreliable results (but then, that’s pretty clearly the purpose here, isn’t it?)

It puts pressure on the students.

My daughter was worried that she had put the wrong answer down, and that those answers might hurt the people she loves. Even the children, in other words, knew that the purpose of this survey wasn’t to help the teachers but was rather to hurt them.

And just so you don’t think that this fear of putting the wrong thing down was just my daughter’s response (and that I might have influenced her to think that someone is out to get our teachers), I have heard the same concern from parents of other students all across the district.

Our children know that our teachers are being attacked by the district. They may not have the words to make this clear, but they know it.

It is being used to attack teachers rather than support them.

Take a look at question 18 again. “Are you tutored outside of school to help you learn this teacher’s subject?” This question, along with question 10, “spends a lot of time practicing for the state test” are clearly designed to be “gotcha” questions. Certainly the only reason a student might need extra tutoring “to help you learn this teacher’s subject” would be if the teacher were failing to adequately teach his or her subject.

If a student had a good teacher, that student would never need additional help outside of school, would they? This is just like the supporters of Common Core claiming that the fact that some students need remediationbefore starting their college classes is a sign that our high schools aren’t doing their jobs.

District Falsely Claims Survey Helps Teachers

The district claimed, in an email sent to a parent, that the information gained from the survey “is not used to evaluate teachers, but as a measure to help teachers understand student’s perceptions of the teacher and instruction.”

This would be wonderful, if only it were true.

You see this isn’t the first time that the district has asked students to evaluate their teachers. They also did it last year, but as I did not have a child in 3rd grade last year, I didn’t hear about it.

But it did happen. Teachers all across the district were assessed by students, and you know what happened with that information? No?

Well, guess what, you’re in good company. No one else knows what happened with that data either. So you see if the district’s assertion that the surveys will be used “as a measure to help teachers understand students” sounds good, but it only works if the teachers who were evaluated by students last year get to see the results of that evaluation. 

So far, I have found not one teacher surveyed last year who has received the results of that student survey.

And so, if the information isn’t being shared with the teachers, how, exactly, is it being used? If the district representative who wrote a parent who asked about the survey was wrong about it being used to “help,” what else was she wrong about?

This survey, like the STAR Enterprise, isn’t being used to benefit your child’s education. At best, it’s simply limiting the time your child’s teacher has to teach. At worse, like the STAR Enterprise test, these opinions are being used to hurt your child’s teacher.

The bottom line, however is this: the survey took time away, again, from your child’s education, and it provided no educational benefit to your child.

Wasted Time

This past Wednesday, a teacher in Huntsville City Schools posted a comment on Facebook. In this comment, this teacher made an ironic and poignant point:

Time. It really is all about time, and our kids don’t have much left in this school year. And the district is filling the little time they have left with pointless surveys and meaningless testing.

And please, someone tell me what other job in the world gets evaluated by eight-year olds? I’ve seen the list of people who were evaluated with the survey displayed above. The superintendent wasn’t on the list. Neither were any of the district personnel, nor were any administrative personnel at the school.

If our student’s perceptions of teachers and instruction are so important, why hasn’t the superintendent subjected himself to the same evaluation by his students? He does, after all, often call himself the top teacher of the district. How could he ever know, how could the board ever know, if he’s doing the right thing without asking an eight-year old?

The post Children Evaluating Teachers appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Picture this. You’re a fly on the wall on Friday morning, and you’re in one of any of our Huntsville City Elementary Schools. As all elementary students (and I hope parents) are aware, Friday tends to be the default testing day in school. It’s the day when students are tested on all the things they learned during the week.

The weekend presents a natural break to the typical elementary schedule. On Mondays and Tuesdays, they learn new stuff. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, they master new stuff. On Friday, they demonstrate that mastery by taking tests. It’s just the way the world works. And so Friday is testing day. It might cover spelling, reading, math, science, grammar, or social studies, and it makes for a busy day on even the best of days.

Plus, it’s Friday. Like the whole rest of the world, our kids are tired and can’t wait for the weekend.

Earlier, in Huntsville City Schools, when a teacher gave a reading test, the class would take out their books, open them, read a passage, and then answer a series of questions about that passage on a piece of paper so the teacher could evaluate their reading comprehension. Perhaps a student or two might need to sharpen their pencils, but otherwise getting ready for the test takes a minimal amount of time. If the test had 20 questions, the total time, start to finish, to administer the test might take 20-25 minutes.

It was a tried and true system that had been honed to a pencil point’s sharpness. It worked.

Fast forward to the present and the wonders of computer-based testing. It’s Friday, and the teacher is getting ready to take that same reading test.

First, all the students have to get their netbooks out, turned on, and booted up. If they followed the suggestions of the district and shut their computers down at least once every night, getting the computers ready for use probably takes about 2-3 minutes. (The beauty of a textbook is that it doesn’t need to be booted to be useful.) While waiting for all 26 of the computers to boot and be ready to use, one student raises her hand. She says, “Ms. Doe? I left my computer at home.” As Ms. Doe moves to help her get set up at the old desktop left in the room, across the room, two more of students raise their hands to say that their batteries only have about 4% remaining on them. Either they forgot to charge them, or the batteries that are now about a year and half old are starting to lose their ability to hold a charge.

Being the master of multitasking (as all teachers are), Ms. Doe asks them to move to the carpet under the smart board and plug in to the outlet there.

Once everyone has a booted computer, Ms. Doe asks them to find the Pearson Reading site. As it’s April, this doesn’t take that long anymore, but at the beginning of the year, it was rather difficult.

You see there isn’t just one single unified Pearson curriculum that you click into on the computers. There’s a site for reading. There’s a site for math. Then there’s a site called Socrative that’s also used for computer-based testing.

Once everyone gets to the proper site, then Ms. Doe has to log-on herself and authorize the test. Usually this is a fairly simple and quick process, but when the entire school is trying to test using Pearson’s site, there are problems. Either the Pearson site cannot handle the load, or the school’s brand new and constantly monitored wireless network can’t.

So the class waits, as patiently as a group of 26 nine and ten year olds can manage, while Ms. Doe attempts to understand if the issue is on the school’s end or on Pearson’s end. Either one is certainly possible.

After about ten minutes, the site begins to work, and now the students have to connect to the test. This involves refreshing their Internet Explorer browser. (For some reason the district has decided that Microsoft’s browser, you know, Gates’ browser, is the only one that students should be allowed to use. It doesn’t matter that the Pearson site opens quicker in Firefox or Chrome, it doesn’t matter that many of the sites that teachers need to use really don’t open in Internet Explorer, that is the only browser allowed to be use on the district’s computers anymore under threat of suspension or even explosion.

Once everyone has a browser that has refreshed showing the available test, the class can finally begin to take the test.

And so, the class who’s patience has already been tested waiting for the system to work, finally begins testing about 25 minutes after they thought they were starting the brief, twenty-question test.

On a good day, that would be the end of the story. The class would complete the test and move on to something else. Perhaps one of the other tests scheduled for the end of the week.

But this wasn’t a good day.

First, one student raises his hand. He’s completed question 14, but for some reason, there’s no button on his screen to click next as there was for the previous 13 questions, and he has no idea how to continue with the test. While she’s working with him, one by one, Ms. Doe begins to be approached by students carrying their netbooks up to her. It seems that the rest of the class is having a similar issue.

Since this happens, oh, nearly every single Friday, Ms. Doe announces that those who are having issues moving forward in the test need to click the save button, close Internet Explorer, and restart the browser.

It seems the new WiFi network that was installed over the summer and that the superintendent has claimed has been “tweaked” ever since has brought all of the testing, on a simple 20 question reading quiz, to a screeching halt.

Literally. When a class of 26 are all stuck during a test, the collective sound is quite similar to a set of faulty brakes on an 18-wheeler, trying to stop at the bottom of Airport Road as it heads to the parkway.

It isn’t pretty.

After everyone in the class has closed their browser, restarted it, connected again to the Pearson site (assuming that the WiFi has stopped hiccuping), they can now get back to the quiz.

Luckily the Pearson people are used to this happening, so most of the class is able to start right back where they left off.

One girl raises her hand to let Ms. Doe know that she can’t go back to the question she was on. She can only go to the question before. So again, Ms. Doe has to work one to one with the student to help her calm down and start over.

When a student believes she’s lost her work, there often follows a fairly panicky few moments for her.

Luckily, there’s a caring human being in the room who can help calm her down so she can continue a quiz that everyone should have finished 15 or 20 minutes earlier.

When the class is able to settle down and continue the test, most of the students restart the test by re-reading the story, after all what was supposed to be a fair quick test is now taking them right up to lunchtime.

They re-start the test, and hopefully this time, they’re able to complete the quiz and see how they did. What should have taken about 20-25 minutes has now taken close to 90 minutes of class time to complete.

I’m sure it’s been a while since many of my readers have taken a test, so let me ask you this: when you really need to concentrate on a project at work, is it helpful or harmful to the quality of that work when the Internet crashes, your computer needs to be restarted, and 25 other nine or ten year-olds are jumping around in your office?

Do you, as an adult, find such an environment helpful?

I didn’t think so.

That’s what placing computers in our classrooms (at a cost of nearly $30 million) has brought us.

That’s what Pearson, HP, and Microsoft have introduced into the classroom.

I’ve asked around, and while this assessment isn’t scientific, the consensus seems to be that it isn’t unusual for a teacher to spend about 30 minutes a day addressing technical issues that our students are facing with the computers.

At 180 days in a school year, 30 minutes a day adds up to a loss of nearly 14 days. That’s almost three weeks of instructional time lost to having our teachers play computer technician.

So that’s what we’ve lost: concentration, money, and time.

What exactly have we gained from the 1:1 digital initiative?

Beginning on April 15th, all of our elementary schools will begin the end of year testing. Every one of them will be taking far more involved tests than a short reading quiz.

And every time the board has asked the superintendent for reassurances that our network will be up to the task of keeping everyone online, his response has been, shall we say, less that reassuring.

It has basically been, “we’ll take care of any issues that we face.”

Hmm, like the district has taken care of network issues that have been on-going since August?

It’s April and we still can’t rely on the computers to take even a simple quiz without interruption.

It’s time to turn them in, not purchase 2,000 more of them as the district approved on Thursday night.

And to those who at the beginning of the said, “We just need to give them time to work out these issues,” it’s April. If it isn’t fixed by now, it isn’t going to be fixed.

The post What The One to One Digital Initiative Really Looks Like appeared first on Geek Palaver.

 The superintendent was known “as a person who got results . . .  and had a strong relationship with the business elite.”

The focus on test scores made the superintendent “a favorite of the national education reform movement.”

“Principals and teachers were frequently told by [the superintendent] and subordinates that excuses for not meeting [testing] targets would not be tolerated.”

“She said teachers were under constant pressure from principals who feared they would be fired if they did not meet the testing targets set by the superintendent.”

“[The superintendent] was known to rule by fear.”

During the superintendent’s tenure, “90 percent of the principals” were replaced.

“Teachers and principals whose students had high test scores received tenure and thousands of dollars in performance bonuses. Otherwise, as one teacher explained, it was ‘low score out the door.’”

One teacher explained a reason she had kept silent so long was that,  ”she could not afford to lose her job.”

The superintendent “was a fearsome presence who would accept no excuses . . . rewarding principals and teachers from schools with high test scores by seating them up front . . . while low scorers were shunted aside to the bleachers.”

The superintendent was also known as someone who was “aloof from parents, teachers and principals. The district spent $100,000 a year for a securitydetail.”

“At public meetings, questions had to be submitted beforehand for screening.”

What made the superintendent “untouchable” were “strong ties to local business leaders.”

A teacher said, “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, my kids want to talk to me, I ignore them. . . . I don’t have the mental energy.”

All of these quotes were taken from the New York Times article “Ex-Schools Chief in Atlanta Is Indicted in Testing Scandal” published yesterday concerning the indictment of Dr. Beverly L. Hall, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools during the testing scandal that erupted in September of 2011. According to the article, she was charged on March 29, 2013 with “racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and making false statements.” She could face 45 years in prison for her actions.

As horrible as the scandal in Atlanta was and still is (the effects on the students who’s scores were adjusted will be felt for the rest of their educational career, at least), enough has been written about that terrible situation. But not enough has been written about the actions of our Superintendent Dr. Casey Wardynski, superintendent of Huntsville City Schools.

As you can see from the links above, nearly everything that was written yesterday about Dr. Hall in Atlanta could also be written about Dr. Wardynski here in Huntsville. About the only thing missing is the amount of time Dr. Hall was in charge of APS and the sheer size of that district as compared to Huntsville.

A Cautionary Tale

Dr. Hall created a culture in Atlanta where principals and teachers were under constant pressure to demonstrate the growth of their students as measured by a standardized test (in their case it was the “Criterion-Referenced Competency Test,” which appears to be similar to the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test–ARMT.) Dr. Wardynski uses the STAR Enterprise test as his primary vehicle to evaluate teachers and their performance.

Dr. Hall created a culture of fear in Atlanta. From nearly the month of his tenure, Dr. Wardynski has striven to create this same culture of fear.

Dr. Hall developed a system that rewarded teachers financially if their students scored well on the CRCT. Dr. Wardynski has developed a system that rewards teachers financially if their students score well on the STAR. At Westlawn alone, Wardynski has budgeted $355,392.00 this year alone in incentives for good test results.

Dr. Hall punished, threatened, and fired teachers who’s students did not meet her expectations. Dr. Wardynski has punished, threatened, fired teachers, and closed entire schools that did not meet his expectations.

Dr. Hall stood aloof from parents and spent ridiculous amounts on security for herself. Dr. Wardynski stands aloof from parents, refuses to answer questions, increases his own personal security while ignoring the safety of our students.

In short, the environment that led to one of the worst cheating scandals in public school history, is exactly the same environment that Dr. Wardynski has created here in Huntsville.

The culture and environment of Huntsville City Schools is just as ripe for a cheating scandal as Atlanta.

Cheating Is Easy

As has been documented by FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, cheating on standardized tests is both widespread and easy.

There have been documented cases of cheating in 37 states as well as the District of Columbia, including Alabama. This number does not include incidents of “suspicious test scores” that have been documented by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This report doesn’t include the amazing turn-around that Dr. Cathy McNeil exclaimed over last month by saying, “I’ve never seen growth like this. It’s phenomenal.”

As I point out last month, when test scores are too good to be true, they quite simply aren’t.

In addition FairTest documents 52 ways that teachers, principals and superintendents have cheated on standardized testing in the past. The list covers pre-test, during the test, and post-test cheating. In short, it is ridiculously easy to cheat on a test if a teacher, administrator, or superintendent is sufficiently motivated to do so.

And we have created an environment where at least two of those three groups are sufficiently motivated.

Teachers and principals are financially rewarded for good test scores. They are punished for bad test scores, including termination. In a city that is living in constant fear of layoffs from sequestration, losing even a $37,000 a year position can be devastating to a family’s finances.

This is what Dr. Wardynski and our inept board of education has brought to our city. While we’ll never be the news story that Atlanta has become, what happened there, I assure you, has already happened here or will soon. (The amazing turn around, and the fudging of the numbers at the district level at Westlawn would be the best place to start looking, but it clearly isn’t the only place where cheating is possible or likely.)

Opt-Out of the STAR Test

So what can we do?

It’s simple: Opt-out of the STAR Test.

The STAR test is not a state mandated test. It is not a federally mandated test. Your child’s scores on that test will not help them get into a better college. And frankly, colleges are beginning to discount testing performance more and more anyway. As a teacher at the post-secondary level, I can tell you first hand that having a student who can perform well on the ACT or the COMPASS test (an entrance exam produced by ACT) does not ensure that a student will perform well in college. My department, for just one example, has found that the students who did well enough on the COMPASS test to place directly into college-level courses like English Composition I were less likely to do well in ENG101 than students who didn’t pass the COMPASS and took ENG093 Developmental English before taking ENG101.

It seems that other colleges are seeing similar results as nearly 850 of them are beginning to discount test scores during the admissions process.

But even if your child is considering attending a college that does require ACT/SAT test scores as a part of the admissions process, there is still no reason for them to be taking the STAR test. Performing well on the STAR test has no impact whatsoever on your child’s grades or on your child’s scores on the ACT/SAT.

In short, there is no reason whatsoever for your child to be taking this test.

It might make you feel good to know that your 3rd grader is reading on a 6th grade level, you should know that statement is totally misleading. Understanding some of the vocabulary that an 6th grader understands does not mean that your 3rd grader has the ability to comprehend at the same level as a 6th grader.

There is no educational benefit to your child to spend up to a day a week, every week preparing to take the STAR test.

That time would be much better spent reading, writing, examining mathematical theorems, or researching the latest advances in rocket science that our neighbors at NASA are developing to take us to Mars.

The STAR test means absolutely nothing to your child. The only reason it is being administered three, four, five, or how many ever times Dr. Wardynski is going to require it to be administered this year is to rank and punish your child’s teacher.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for your child to have spent that time, oh I don’t know, learning something?

If you agree, tell your child’s teacher and principal that you opt-out, and that you instead want your child to spend more time learning rather than testing.

Heck, we might even manage to keep Dr. Wardynski out of jail as a result.

See, I don’t hate the man.

The post Avoid Cheating Scandals: Opt-Out of the STAR Test appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Tonight that the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education, the board presented a resolution to honor those individuals who are retiring from Huntsville City Schools this year. The resolution was read at the beginning of the “Celebrations” part of the meeting that they have at the beginning of most of their meetings. The resolution presented tonight to the board for its approval by Dr. Cooper was read as follows:

Resolution

Whereas the Huntsville City BOE Huntsville Alabama wishes to honor all personnel retiring from the HCS, and

Whereas these retirees have diligently served the boys and girls of this community for a significant number of years, and

Whereas, their services have been rendered in an unselfish manner, not only to the students and the school system, but to many areas of community life, and

Whereas, their loyalty and dedication to providing quality public education have exerted a tremendous and positive influence upon their associates, and

Whereas they are held in high esteem by their friends, and colleagues.

Now, therefore, Be It Resolved that the Huntsville City Board of Education, the superintendent and staff, as well as administrative, teaching and support staff do hereby express appreciation to retiring personnel, and

Be It Further Resolved that be extended best wishes for good health and happiness throughout the retirement years, with a sense of personal achievement that come with knowledge of a job well done.

Adopted this twenty-first day of March 2013

Join me in celebrating our retirees.

This resolution was followed by what could best be described as seven seconds of polite applause from the board and those in attendance. Once that “uproar” died down, Dr. Cooper moved on to about 20 minutes of honoring our sports stars from around the city.

Interestingly enough, all of the sports stars that were honored tonight actually received an invitation to attend the board meeting so that they could receive copies of their resolution and be honored in person. Some were even given the opportunity to share a few words with the community about their achievement.

Interestingly enough, none of our retirees who have “diligently served” this community for a “significant number of years;” none of our retirees who have rendered their services “in an unselfish manner;” none of the retirees who have “exerted a tremendous and positive influence” were actually invited to attend this meeting.

Now granted, if they had been invited to attend, the Fire Marshall would likely have needed to cite Dr. Wardynski for code violation, as I don’t believe the board room at Merts is certified to hold more than about 50 people at a time, but surely something could have been worked out. Perhaps we could have had them line up on the steps of Merts for a photo shoot?

177 Volunteer to Leave

You see as of the reading of the HR report tonight, a total of one hundred and seventy-seven teachers, administrators and support staff have decided to either retire or resign since September of last year.

And 177 would have clearly never fit in that tiny board room with its uncomfortable chairs.

And there’s no way that the superintendent would have wanted a photo of the 177 standing on the steps of Merts all together at one time.

I mean honestly, what kind of message would that send to our community? It’s much better that those steps simply remain empty, and that our “resolutions” be free from showing the faces of the 177 who have decided to leave this district in the past seven months.

Who knows, after all, what they might end up saying if given a mic? They might let us know that if they had their choice that they would have preferred to continue teaching a few more years. They might have let us know that they really didn’t want to leave this year, but the move away from teaching towards endless testing made the decision easy. They might have let us know that they simply couldn’t take the hostile working environment that the superintendent has created here for the simple purpose of driving away some of our best and brightest teachers and most dedicated support staff that had made this system one of the best.

What Huntsville Used to Be

I write what I know, and nine years ago my wife and I moved here to Huntsville (not to Madison, Huntsville) because of a simple reason, our first child was about to be born. And so we moved here because we knew that Huntsville, despite being in a state that isn’t exactly known as an educational powerhouse even in the south (thank goodness for Mississippi), Huntsville was an exception to that stereotype. Huntsville bucked that trend.

We knew that our children would receive and excellent and competitive public education.

But because of the rubber-stamp attitude of the board before (and after) Wardynski, this is no longer true. And with the total disregard that our board offers to our teachers, I’m afraid that Huntsville will not be the exception in the state any longer. We now tend to fit right in.

I know that there are some of my readers who, like certain members of our board, believe that a younger teacher is absolutely a better teacher. I know that there are some readers who believe, like certain administrators, that older teachers tend to turn a school into a “wax museum.” I know that some in this town believe just as one of the now retired board members said last year that it’s great to have young, inexperienced TFAers in the classroom.

I do not agree.

Teacher of the Year Among the 177

It seems that for once the Huntsville Council of PTAs and I actually agree on something. You see this year, the Elementary Teacher of the Year for the city of Huntsville is one of those teachers that the board of education was “resolved” to honor tonight. She has taught multiple generations of families and is still going strong. She stays after school nearly every day to help her students (and even those who were never in her classroom) understand difficult concepts. She’s constantly offering new books about new approaches to teaching to her peers and to her parents to help to find a way through the perilous path of elementary school.

She lives and breathes elementary education and has more knowledge about meeting students’ needs in her little pinky finger than Wardynski and our board of “education” will ever know.

She is an amazing teacher and leader, and we’re losing her and all of her knowledge and wisdom because, as David Blair once said, Wardynski is doing exactly what this board of education hired Wardynski to do. His primary job, his primary goal is to run off our best teachers.

But you know what the amazing thing is? I know a ton of our teachers and support staff in this district, and I know many of the 177 who have quit or retired. Of those that I know who have quit or are retiring at the end of the year, all of the wonderful things I had to say about the Huntsville Elementary Teacher of the Year (not to take anything alway from her, but I know she wouldn’t mind) apply to those other teachers, librarians, and staff as well.

Let me say it again: every teacher, librarian and staff member that I personally know who is planning to retire are among the most dedicated, committed people in our district. And we’ve lost them.

And the board continues to unanimously approve HR report after HR report without asking a single damn question about why our teachers are rushing to get out the door.

In May 2011, the board approved a reduction in force of 259 people. That was one of the darkest periods of our district.

So far in seven months 177 have left on their own. I’m horrified to write this, but by the end of May 2013 the 259 we RIFed in 2011 will seem small by comparison.

The absolute least that Wardynski and this Board could do is have the decency to look these 177 in the face. But then bullies do tend to also be cowards.

__________

To any teacher, administrator or support staff person who is leaving Huntsville City Schools: I invite you to share your story in the comments below. You may do so with the assurance of anonymity; honestly, I don’t even know who you are most of the time. I ask you to share your story with us for just one reason: we need you to help educate us one more time before you leave.

I hope that in the telling you may find closure and peace knowing that you have indeed given your all to help this city’s schools survive the wasteland that Wardynski and the Board are creating.

And sincerely, I thank you for your service to my children and to all our children across this community.

You will be missed.

The post 177 (And Counting) Volunteer to Leave appeared first on Geek Palaver.

On Wednesday of this week, the Alabama State Senate’s Education Committee “delayed indefinitely” consideration of a SB190, the bill to revoke common core standards in the state. It seemed that that was the end of the discussion concerning Common Core (or as Alabama has labeled CCSS “Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards”). But the House also has a bill, HB254, that it needs to deal with, and it seems that they will be considering it on Wednesday, March 20th.

Perhaps it is still possible to bring an end to our districts insane obsession with testing after all.

Cause you see, that is what the Common Core State Standards (or Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards if you prefer) is actually all about.

Common Core Is Testing

We’ve seen it here in Huntsville, where we’ve already spent, according to Dr. Wardynski, $40 million implementing CCSS. If you don’t believe me, listen to Wardynski and take a look at the report that the district offered to the board at the last board meeting.

It seems that something weird is happening about the testing schedule these days. The report that you see above is the only publicly available report from that meeting, but as you can see in the video below, the report that they shared with the board on March 7th was far more extensive. So much so that at the end of Dr. McNeal’s presentation Mr. Birney actually had to ask for a copy of the presentation to be sent to board members.

If this data and this plan is so important to the superintendent’s plans for the district (as you’ll hear him say in a moment), why isn’t this data readily available on the board’s website?

Here’s what Wardynski had to say in defense of the Common Core Standards:

Wardynski: Cathy while you’re on this topic, you know there’s this bill that still under debate down in Montgomery about Common Core Standards. The key word in quality core is core. These assessments are fully aligned with Common Core, and there’s a great deal of rigor in them. And so, uh, if the state took a direction other than parallel with the common core, that would upend this sequence of testing we’re actually undertaking in a matter of months. So our kids have been brought to this standard this year. We’re working towards it; our teachers are working towards it. And, uh, that would be a massive step backwards for this school system. Um, what we will have learned is never get ahead in Alabama. Uh, we’re working pretty hard to get our kids launched into the future, and so, I think the state is going to take about five years to work in all these assessments. Uh, we’re prepared this year to begin working them in so our kids have that option. Uh, they’re working to that level of rigor. And so this system’s moving pretty quickly to move our, uh, kids to the national standards. And uh, a step away from this an is certainly one that will preclude us from keeping data, as that law would. Or that would preclude us from aligning with common core would undo all this work, and undoubtedly millions of dollars of investments we’ve already made in teacher development, uh, preparing for these assessments, training.

Uh, of course, the other key word in there is ACT. To get on to college in this are of the country, uh, you take the ACT. And when we go to the ACT, um components of that are 100% aligned with the common core. The minimal alignment is 66%. So if we’re off training, uh educating our children to some standard other than the common core, I just don’t understand that when we’re trying to get our kids ready to pass the ACT and get great scores to get into college. It makes no sense to head in one direction and then give us our kids a test that heads in the exact opposite direction. Um so uh none of this debate about moving away from common core makes any sense to me. It makes no sense economically, either, because whatever we do that’s unique to us, we’re going to have to pay for as a state. And right here the quality core, the ACT, common core, um, materials, those costs are spread by those who develop them across 47 states. Uh, Alabama doesn’t have enough money right now to educate our kids the way we need to, and I certainly don’t want to divert any money to creating some kind of unique Alabama curriculum that wouldn’t align with college readiness, things businessmen have told us kids need to know, assessments we know, uh, are going to incorporate a lot more rigor. Um, and, and things we’ve already made investments in to help move education forward. So, these assessments here are entirely part of that common core debate. Thanks.

In Wardynski’s own words, “So, these assessments here are entirely part of that common core debate.” (Notice that he again claims that CCSS and the tests that are aligned with them “are going to incorporate a lot more rigor,” and yet again he offers no evidence of any kind supporting this claim.)

Our elementary students will spend the final month of school taking standardized tests. Our high school students will take the end-of-course exams in April so that they will have time to take all of their other tests during the month of May. And spending a month of testing, on top of all the other testing that our students have already done, is how Wardynski believes we should “launch our kids into the future.”

Honestly, if the future is entirely testing without education, that future is a bleak one at best.

No Transparency

As an interesting aside, you’ll note that the material that the district is posting about testing has been purged from the district’s website of late. The link to the spreadsheet showing the testing dates for 2012-2013 that I pulled information from for the “Star Testing A District to Death” post last month is for some reason no longer working. I wonder if they’ve had a computer problem, or something. Well I wouldn’t want the district to lose files, so I’m pleased to share with them a copy of the file that I downloaded last month. I share it here (Test Dates 2012-2013 FINAL HCS Testing Dates (4).xlsx) with the district in a show of good will. I hope they’re able to fix their computer issues soon.

Why is the district being so coy about when and how often they’re testing our children?

Could it be that even they now realize that the testing they’re requiring our district to complete is excessive? Dr. McNeal’s opening comment, that this seems like a lot of testing, would certainly lead one to believe that even she thinks this test schedule is excessive.

But if that’s not enough evidence that Common Core is testing, perhaps this will convince you.

PARCC Common Core Tests Add Ten Hours

This week, Education Week, published a report entitled, “Common-Core Tests to Take Up to 10 Hours.”

Just so you don’t think I’m reading some other conspiracy theorist here, please note that this report is based entirely on information from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC. PARCC is one of two primary groups who are developing tests in math and English that are aligned to CCSS. In other words, this organization is 110% in support of CCSS and their implementation.

They are not, as some have called me and others who oppose CCSS here in Alabama, a part of the “black-helicopter” crowd. This information is coming from those who support CCSS.

Even the other primary group developing CCSS assessments (or tests), the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium estimates that their tests will take up to eight and half hours.

PARCC is also mandating that its tests will be administered during a 20 day window when school is 75% complete and then an additional 20 day window at 90% completion.

You may read these details for yourself in PARCC’s “Guidance Document.” This document calls for third graders to spend 8 hours taking the math and English tests and for twelfth graders to spend 9 hours and 55 minutes taking these tests at least twice a year.

In other words, third through eighth graders will have approximately 44 days for testing and ninth through twelfth graders will be looking at 61 days of testing if these new assessments were added to the list this year. While it is possible that some of the current tests would be removed from the test schedule (as Dr. McNeal says, the graduation exam is being phased out), there can be no denying that one of the central purposes of the Common Core State Standards is to increase the number of hours spent and the importance of standardized testing in our district.

Oh, and one other important admission can be found in article about these standards and the testing that will follow:

PARCC documents say that testing times and windows could change, in the wake of research and field-testing, but that “major changes are not anticipated.”

In other words, like the standards themselves, none of these new tests have been field-tested. We have no idea if these tests will be effective in assessing student learning at all. We have no idea if the standards themselves will increase student learning and their “college and career readiness.”

Testing isn’t education. It is a crucial component of the educational process, but it isn’t education. Every day spent evaluating what a student has learned is one less day in which they can learn something new.

Best Practices: Finland

If those responsible for pushing these standards and these tests onto our students actually cared about students and education, you would think that they would look around the globe to see what all those countries who are out performing American on those international rankings were doing. This is known as basing our educational pedagogy and curriculum on the best practices around the world. Finland regularly scores at the top of those rankings, and they do so without any standardized testing. As Partanen writes:

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

Testing isn’t education. And anyone who claims that it is, is usually trying to sell you something.

Ask Your House Member to Support HB254

If you think that your child is being tested too much, please, please contact the Alabama House members who will be involved in a hearing to decided what to do with their version of the bill to revoke the CCSS Initiative (HB254), and tell them to support the bill. Tell them that our students are tested too much as it is, and that CCSS isn’t about a set of curriculum standards nearly as much as it is about testing.

You may contact the House members here:

Rep. Lesley Vance (R), Chair: (334) 298-0668 (office), (334) 298-4948 (home)
Rep. Elaine Beech (D): elainebeech83@gmail.com, (334) 242-7702 (office), (251) 847-2604 (home)
Rep. Mac Buttram (R): mbuttram@att.net, (334) 242-7775 (office), (256) 297-2286 (home)
Rep. Ed Henry (R): (334) 242-7736 (office), (256) 260-2146 (District)
Rep. Thomas Jackson (D): (334) 242-7738 (office), (334) 636-0094 (home)
Rep. David Sessions (R): d.r.sessions@att.net, (334) 242-0947 (office), (251) 865-4275 (home)
Rep. Phil Williams (R): philhouse44@gmail.com, (334) 242-7704, (256) 489-5471 (home)

Common Core is testing. Even the supporters admit this. As Wardynski says the “rigor” found in Common Core is found entirely in the testing that goes along with CCSS. If “rigor” means “testing,” then I suppose that CCSS is more rigorous after all.

It certainly does increase standardized testing.

The post Common Core Is Testing appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Here in Huntsville, the teachers and staff of our district, most of whom have given their time, their money, their very lives for our schools, are being systematically insulted, embarrassed, bullied, and abused on a daily basis.

They are being told that they are not dedicated. They are being told that anyone can do their jobs. They are being labeled as rude, inconsiderate, hostile, and insubordinate.

They are being treated like children who are incapable of thinking for themselves.

They are being hit, spat upon, bitten, and threatened by both students and their supervisors. They are being hit, spat upon, bitten and threatened by students, and their supervisors are ignoring the issues of safety and are, in fact, threatening the teachers jobs if they report it.

And they feel like they are completely and totally alone in this.

They have difficulty knowing whom they can trust.

They have a tough time trusting each other because of the district’s policy to pit teacher against teacher in test scores. Star Test results have become a zero sum game to the superintendent. He’s convinced that there can only be one winner. If you’re not number one in your grade, you’re a loser.

They can’t trust their principals because they tend to be the one carrying out the abuse. People who are themselves being abused by their supervisors often become abusers in turn. This is regularly happening in Huntsville. Principals who are looking to complete just one or two more years before they can retire, are doing whatever they can to let the shit flow down hill. (I’m please to say that this isn’t the case with every principal, but it is the case with many of them.)

This zero sum game has hit them, too. They’re being told that if their test scores in reading and math aren’t “the best in the district” then their successes are irrelevant.

They can’t trust their professional organizations because the representatives of that organization are regularly taking a go-along, get-along approach with the district leadership on issues such as reinstating scale raises, and school turn-around models.

They certainly can’t trust the feckless board of education that rubber stamps every abusive action the bully of a superintendent wishes to enact.

Some of them even celebrate the our educators leaving.

A zero sum game hurts everyone. But that’s what Wardynski wants: he wants everyone to hurt and to quit. So far 165 teacher and staff have decided, enough is enough, and have either announced their retirement or just walked away.

One-hundred and sixty-five since September 4, 2012.

If we don’t do something now, that number will increase by a factor of five at the end of this year.

And you and I as parents are the only ones who can do anything at all to make this better.

If you think this isn’t happening at your child’s school, you are deluding yourself. This abuse is happening everywhere in this district because abusing others is all that our insecure, immature superintendent seems to be good at.

If you care about your child’s education, if you care about living in a town that values education, please consider doing at least one of the follow:

1. Talk to your child’s teachers, support staff, and aides in person. Tell them that you can’t believe the pressure that they must be working under and that you’re sorry they’re facing it. If this is the first time you’ve spoken to them this year, don’t expect them to open up to you first. They can’t. But don’t let that drive you away.
2. Tell them how much you appreciate what they have done for your child this year. Be genuine and specific. You won’t believe how long it has been since they’ve heard a simple thank you.
3. Take them a small snack, or if you see them out in town, take an opportunity to pay it forward. Celebrate the gifts that they have given your children publicly and loudly.
4. Call and write their principal, and tell the him or her how much you appreciate the work that your child’s teachers have done for your child. Be specific. If you know that they have gone beyond their jobs descriptions (believe me, they have), let the principal know.
5. Call and write your school board member. Tell them about how hard your teachers, support staff, and aides are working. Ask them to please do more to support them and to end the hostile working environment they have allowed to grow.
6. I would suggest you write Dr. Wardynski, but honestly, he doesn’t care. Communicating with parents is nothing but a hassle to him. You would be wasting your time.
7. Call and write your State School Board member about the abuse that you see for yourself here in our district. You may contact Mary Scott Hunter at hunter@maryscotthunter.com or (888) 531-1312.
8. Talk to your child. Ask him or her about school and what’s happening. Trust me, as much as we adults sometimes think we are shielding our kids from harsh realities of life, we aren’t. Children always know. Always.

It’s time to stand up for the people who are willing to lay down their lives for our kids.

Do It Now. Please. Otherwise you’ll likely soon find your child in an empty classroom on the losing end of this zero sum game.

The post Wardynski’s Zero Sum Game of Abusing Teachers appeared first on Geek Palaver.

In a surprise move, the board actually discussed yet another new site location for Grissom High School tonight. Since there were objections to the first “Weatherly Road” site, they have talked with the Hays family and have instead settled on a site that is directly south of that site, immediately behind Sam’s Club on South Parkway.

Here’s a picture of the “new” new Grissom site.

Supposedly this location is “even better” that the first new Grissom site that was originally considered just north of this location in the reddish area pictured above.

Dr. Wardynski, with his trademarked smirk, even made a point of thanking all the people who “were worried about this issue. They helped us get a better piece of land.” (Dr. Robinson, ever the cheerleader, can be heard in the background giggling at this remark.) Dr. Wardynski completed his comments by saying that they would be bringing a proposal to the board to vote on this new site in April.

Then Dr. Robinson chimed in. Dr. Robinson is the board member for Grissom High, and there has never been a Wardynski nor a development proposal that she didn’t love.

Here’s what she had to say about this presentation.

Robinson: I just want to say how excited I am to see this. I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and I know the community has as well, for just, for something definitive. And y’all have done a remarkable job of negotiating this and finding the very best possible piece of land, and I can’t wait to see what we do as we go forward. Just to clarify then, we will have a contract at some point in April? According to this timeline?

Wardynski: If not sooner.

Robinson: If not sooner? Excellent. And the key piece of concern is what happens to the existing site, and plans are in place there, and so we should have that also in April, if not sooner? Some sense of what that will look like?

Wardynski: We’re working on a separate agreement with the city.

Robinson: But the assurance is, that whatever goes into that site will add value to the neighborhood. We’re not hanging a for sale sign on it. It’s not going to be an empty space. It’s going to be a partnership that will really increase the value of that . . .

Wardynski: (interrupting) It’ll become city property. And their intentions, I’ve been talking to the mayor, is theater, gym, athletic facilities, and maybe some other additional features. s

Robinson: But again, it’ll be a strength to that neighborhood. It’s sort of a part of a package?

Upchurch: The words up there “Community Asset” came right out of Mayor Battle’s off . . . uh mouth. I used his words.

Robinson: Thank you, very much, everybody, for your work on this.

She’s really excited about this.

And you’ll notice how she and Dr. Wardynski are speaking of this: it’s a done deal. Back in January during the single community meeting that they held, they (Wardynski, Upchurch, and Wilson) made a point of telling the community that no decision had been made yet concerning the location of Grissom.

Then on Saturday, Councilman Olshefski told the Times:  ”Dr. Wardynski is getting ready to come out with a plan, that’s going to show what happens if the school moves over to another site.”

I guess this is that plan. And you’ll note that the plan made no mention of leaving Grissom in its current location. As Robinson referred to this plan, this is “something definitive.” In other words, when they bring a recommendation to the board in April (if not sooner), Wardynski will recommend exactly one location: directly behind Sam’s Club.

Rebuilding on the current site is a dead deal. It’s time to put your house on the market. The current Grissom will be closed in three years.

Robinson then followed up her sycophantic praise with another “interesting” claim:

But you know, I would also note that the letters that we got, and I think we got ten of them, were from out of state. They weren’t from the local community. They weren’t from people who had concerns for the needs of our children. And that’s our prime responsibility. So, you know, while I appreciate their efforts to share with us where archeological remains are located so they could continue to hunt, we have a responsibility to educate our kids and provide the best possible resources for them, and I think we’ve done that.

So evidently, the only opposition that Robinson received was from groups who were out of state and only concerned about hunting. She received no other “letters” from “the local community.”

“Interesting,” isn’t it? Someone asked me after hearing this: “Did you check to see if her pants were on fire?”

Wardynski, ever one to suck up to the business interests in this town corrected her statement that they were doing this “for the kids,” by saying:

Well, and I always think we’re here to add value to our city. And for the folks in that area (which are whom, exactly?) this ought to add a  nice boost to property values, growth and all that.

And so we close on the truth. What really concerns Wardynski isn’t the kids and their education, but rather “adding value to our city.”

One question, Dr. Robinson, if I may. If you’re right that the community fully supports this plan to move Grissom from its current location, then why exactly was this discussion held under an agenda item entitled, “G. High School Update“? If the community truly does support the moving of Grissom High to a parkway location, then why was the agenda specifically and intentionally misleading? Surely it wouldn’t have taken that much more time to write, “G. Grissom High School Update,” would it?

(Not to worry. I’ll be sure and send you this question via certified letter tomorrow morning. What’s that address again? Oh that’s right, you don’t publish your mailing address on the district’s website, do you?)

No, they couldn’t let people know what they were talking about tonight because then people in the community might have actually shown up for the meeting to hear Robinson claim that the only complaints she’s received were from out of state.

Then people in the community might have been their to see Mr. Upchurch celebrating his easy presentation to the board in the hallway once he had been dismissed.

Then people would have been there to ask questions about this move and the motivations driving it.

Then, people would have heard Wardynski state that this decision was made to “add value to our city.”

They were, in fact, so afraid that the public might show up that they couldn’t even give the public 24 hours notice that they were talking about Grissom again.

These are the moves and actions of cowards who obviously do not believe that the decisions they’re making are the best for “our children” as Robinson claimed.

They are the best decisions for the Hays family and all the developers who are just chomping at the bit to start building a new subdivision in that area.

That’s what this board cares about. They’re just too cowardly to admit it before a room full of citizens who might call them out for putting developers ahead of children.

Rumor has it that land moving equipment was seen on this location today. So much for involving the public in this decision.

The post Another New Grissom Site to “Add Value To City” appeared first on Geek Palaver.

The Huntsville Council of PTAs (or at least the president Mrs. Elise Ferrell, since we still don’t know how the HCPTAs determines its legislative agenda) has been busy over the past week. Yesterday they sent out their second “Legislative Alert” in five days to help drum up even more support to opposed the HB254/SB190 repealing of the Common Core State Standards initiative in the Alabama legislature.

Yesterday, HCPTAs sent out “their” thoughts about the prohibition against Common Core. This “report” has since been republished and dispersed by the Superintendent’s office to “AllUsers@hsv-k12.org.” (If you ever needed evidence that the HCPTAs and the Superintendent march in lockstep with one another, that should convince you.) They are using the PTA’s mailing list as well as the district’s mailing list to push the superintendent’s agenda, I thought that it might be worth while to take a look at what she had to say. You may read the “legislative update” for yourself, if you wish, by following this link. I encourage you to do so, as I will be lifting several quotes from this update to help provide some context and reference to their claims. (It will also be helpful for you to read Mrs. Ferrell’s piece since I’ve noticed that several people are simply quoting her without attribution in their opposition to the bill. If you read the source, you’ll find it easier to follow the breadcrumbs when you hear the same arguments from others.)

This is yet another long post. If you’re interested in just a summary, you can find one at the end of the post.

So let’s jump right in to what the Huntsville Council of PTAs (or at least Mrs. Ferrell) has to say. From the second sentence of the email, the HCPTAs jumps immediately into the hyperbolic mode to make the superintendent’s case for him.

“Academic rigor is being challenged.”

And right from the start, HCPTAs’ claims are questionable. How exactly is “academic rigor” being challenged? There is exactly zero evidence supporting this claim. You see, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are being forced on America entirely without testing them to see if they are indeed more rigorous. You cannot prove that a standard is more “rigorous” simply by comparing one sentence on a page to another sentence on another page. The only way to prove that one set of standards is indeed more “rigorous” than another is to test them in a controlled setting. And this is something that the sponsors of CCSS are steadfastly refusing to do. They are instead, by implementing them nation-wide without trials, turning us into a “nation of guinea pigs.”

“It [repealing Common Core] could severely damage the quality of education in Alabama.”

Again, there is absolutely no evidence supporting this claim. Since the CCSS haven’t been tested, anywhere, there is no evidence that repealing the CCSS in Alabama will damage anything.

What do we know here in Huntsville, though? We know that the incessant testing that has followed the adoption of the standards here. And we know that this obsession with testing is hurting eduction here.

Some readers have mentioned to me that the standards are not tests. In this, they are correct. However, everywhere that the standards have begun to be implemented, standardized testing has expanded exponentially. I have not been able to find one single district that begins to implement CCSS without also implementing some form of standardized testing to “justify” the expense of switching their curriculum. (And by the way, that expense is estimated to be in the tens of billions for the nation as a whole.)

“Legislature would disallow longitudinal data to be collected on students (in lay terms, the data on a students’ [sic] progression in test scores like ACT, SAT, ARMT) and ban a school from applying for any grants that require Alabama to report data on students.”

This isn’t accurate. HCPTAs claims that HB254/SB190 would “ban a school from applying for any grants that require Alabama to report data on students.” This is categorically false. If they would simply take a look at Section 1.C.(2).a, the bill clearly states:

Student or teacher data may be shared with the United States Department of Education only when: 1. Such data-sharing is required by the United States Department of Education as a condition of receiving a federal grant.

So I suppose that Alabama can, in fact, apply for a grant that requires Alabama to report data. I suppose that HCPTA didn’t read as closely as they should.

“The bill goes further stating that the legislature (politicians), and not the State Department of Education (educators), would set curriculum standards for our students.”

This is perhaps the most ironic statement in the entire update. First, no, the bill doesn’t state that the legislature would set curriculum standards. It states:

Any statewide school standard may not be adopted or implemented unless: (1) A public hearing is held in each Congressional District. (2) The State Board of Education solicits input from educators, content experts, parents and other members of the community during  an open comment period of one year. (3) Joint open hearings are held before the Senate Education Policy Committee and the House of Representatives Education Policy Committee. (4) The standard receives a majority vote of the Alabama Legislature.

Remember in 2010 when the Legislature adopted the CCSS? Well, if that decision meant that “(politicians)” and not “(educators)” set the curriculum standards, then I suppose that this process would mean the same. But somehow I don’t think that HCPTAs questioned having the “politician” approve the standards, did they?

But really the best part of this statement is simply HCPTAs’ new-found respect for “(educators).” I seem to recall that the Council nominated and celebrated Dr. Wardynski’s being named Superintendent of the Year just a few short months ago. Perhaps they don’t recall that Dr. Wardynski has far more in common with a politician than he ever will with an actual educator.

But irony has never been a strong suit of the council.

“The Common Core Standards only pertain to Math and English Core classes.”

Wow, we finally came across something that is, at the present time anyway, accurate. It’s true that they currently only apply to math and English, but there are clear plans to expand from these two areas into Science, World Languages and Art (standards for art. That’s right, beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder. Soon a national coalition will inform and, more importantly, test your students on their mastery of the art standards.

The interesting point here, however, is that by focusing solely on math and English, other subjects will become at best second class citizens. If you know that the test is going to cover only math and English, you’re going to spend the majority of your time focused on, you guessed it, math and English. As Marion Brady writes:

The Common Core Standards assume that what kids need to know is covered by one or another of the traditional core subjects. In fact, the unexplored intellectual terrain lying between and beyond those familiar fields of study is vast, expands by the hour, and will go in directions no one can predict.

When you’re holding a hammer, all the world looks like a nail, doesn’t it?

“The Common Core standards are not a federal mandate . . . “

While this is technically true, Congress has not passed a law requiring the implementation of CCSS, this is disturbingly disingenuous. Without a law being passed by Congress, the Department of Education cannot mandating a curriculum to a schools system; however, the Department of Education can mandate requirements to receive a grant from the Department of Education. And that’s exactly what they have done in this case.

So you see, if you want to receive any of the $4.35 billion that the Department of Education is handing out via their Race to the Top program, you must sign onto CCSS.

As such, this is being mandated by the Department of Education, and the HCPTAs is intentionally trying to deceive their readers/members into thinking otherwise.

You know, telling the whole truth really is the best way to convince someone to change their mind. I wonder why HCPTAs believed it was better to be disingenuous on this point?

” . . . they were written by the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.”

Once again, it really is better to tell the whole truth. As Dr. Ravitch writes:

They were developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, both of which were generously funded by the Gates Foundation. There was minimal public engagement in the development of the Common Core. Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from the states.

The source of these standards is actually well documented on the web, and it doesn’t take but a moment or two of searching to find additional evidence about their development.

As Ohanian writes a more accurate statement concerning the authorship of CCSS would be the following list:

Here are the significant players in deforming school curriculum and testing and their Gates haul.

• Achieve, Inc.: $25,787,051
• The Council of Chief State School Officers: $71,302,833
• National Governors Association Center for Best Practices: $30,679,116

Chief architects of the literacy content for the Common Core content are a lawyer and David Coleman, an education entrepreneur. Coleman gained the most notoriety as he barnstormed the country preaching the importance of nonfiction and a bastardized form of New Criticism, a literary theory abandoned long ago by just about everybody except Mr. Coleman. In his presentation at the New York State Education Building in April 2011, Coleman declared that teachers must tell students: “When you grow up in this world you realize people don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” Student Achievement Partners, an outfit Coleman co-founded is now churning out Common Core curriculum. They’re bankrolled by $6,533,350 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and $18,000,000 from the General Electric Foundation. Coleman has moved on to head the College Board ($31,178,497 in Gates funds).

It’s good to be a Friend of Bill (Gates) again.

So you see, it would be far more accurate for HCPTAs to say that CCSS were written by Bill Gates rather than trying to imply that they were written by the National Governors Association (I thought we didn’t want politicians writing educational policy?), and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

CCSS was written by a small group of individuals almost entirely funded by Bill Gates. They were then forced on the states in order to receive federal funding. They did not arise from the states at all.

“Representatives from the National PTA office also participated in the crafting of Common Core standards.   National PTA supports the continued implementation of Comon [sic] Core Standards in every state.”

Yes, and they were paid handsomely to do so. You see, when you have more money than god, it’s easy to just buy support from organizations who might oppose you. The National PTA office that they cite as proof that CCSS is a good thing has received up to $2,005,000 in funding from Mr. Gates to “support” the standards. They aren’t alone. Gates has given money to nearly every single cheerleading organization for CCSS.

Here’s a short listing compiled by Ohanian of some of the groups that have received funding from Gates to support CCSS publicly:

The Common Core State (sic) Standards are the result of hundreds of millions of dollars disbursed in carefully distributed grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accompanied by the threat from U. S. Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold federal funds if individual states did not sign on the dotted line. I looked at two months worth of press citations praising the CCSS –August and September, 2012–and then looked up the Gates money given to those who come to praise CCSS. The list ranges from the American Federation of Teachers ($1,000,000) to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction ($823,637), from the neo-liberal Center for American Progress ($2,998,809) to the neo-conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute ($5,711,462). The PTA got money ($2,005,000); so did the National Writing Project ($2,645,593). And so on and so on. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and with money in their pockets, many are eager to sing the Common Core song and eat the funeral meats.

It’s a new world where private individuals and companies are making decisions from Seattle and Washington, DC for every school child in the nation. If you think you still have a voice in what you child learns, just ask yourself, how much money did you give to the PTA this year?

I think Gates’ voice is a bit louder, don’t you?

“In a nutshell, the standards create consistent education standards for each grade level for everyone across the country.”

As I demonstrated in my last post about the CCSS, a de facto (and amazingly more democratic) standard already existed for each grade level for everyone across the country.

“The common core standards have more rigor than our previous standards; giving our students the skills they need for college, and for a career.”

Again, where is the evidence showing this? Has the PTA run peer-reviewed trials to support this claim? These standards have not been tested in any way. The best “evidence” that exists is anecdotal in nature and limited to one or two individuals. Gates, Arne Duncan and company decided that doing a trial run would cost too much, and so there is no peer-reviewed evidence supporting this claim.

“Students were leaving high school unprepared for college, and would have to take remedial classes or additional classes, adding extra semesters and extra tuition cost.”

And here’s some more anecdotal evidence. True, there are some students who leave high school unprepared for college. Those students who left high school when they were 16 or 17 as a drop out, would leave high school unprepared for college.

Students who did not take advantage of the education that the district provided for them while they were in school, would leave high school unprepared for college.

Student who don’t have a strong parental influence encouraging them to study and prepare, would leave high school unprepared for college.

Students who decided that work, and putting food on the table were more important goals than high school, would leave high school unprepared for college.

Students who blow off the ACT or the SAT because they are sick of taking standardized tests that seem to mean nothing at all, would leave high school seemingly unprepared for college.

Students who blow off the entrance exam they were required to take upon entering college, would leave high school seemingly unprepared for college.

What do all those students have in common? Not one of them would be helped by changing the curriculum to CCSS.

Furthermore, HCPTAs should do some research before making their claims. As you can see from the chart below and a report by the National Center for Education Statistics, first-year undergraduate remedial coursetaking has declined from a rate of 26% in 1999 down to 20% in 2008.

Remediation is declining not increasing.

“Unfortunately, Alabama is not alone in this battle.  The standards are currently being challenged in 14 states, and Indiana has already repealed their standards earlier this year.”

Wow, they’re telling the truth. 46 states adopted Common Core between 2010 and 2012, and now a third of them, after having spent the past two years reviewing common core are deciding that the incessant testing is harming their schools and students. This movement away from these untested standards will continue over the next couple of years.

“Having this legislation come in under the radar was intentional.”

In what way was this bill introduced “under the radar?” It was introduced just as every other bill was introduced.

“What do we stand to lose if it passes? Funding, jobs, students’ futures.” [sic]

Wait, funding? I thought this wasn’t a federally mandated program? Why would we lose funding if the feds aren’t pushing us to do this? Oh, that’s right, we will lose funding, potentially, because this is in practice a federally mandated program. 

“Schools or school systems cannot apply for any grants with any organization that requires historical data on students.”

I’m not sure which bill the HCPTAs is reading, but SB190 actually does allow for data to be shared with the department of Education “as a condition of receiving a federal grant.” It simply provides some guidelines that are designed to protect student information from being collected, distributed and sold, as companies like Pearson are doing right now.

The real question here is why isn’t the PTA supporting a move by our legislators to protect student privacy? I thought they were supposed to be a student-centered organization?

“Huntsville has local business people currently in Washington, D.C. for a conference.  They have been informed that businesses with an Alabama presence are threatening to pull out of our state if we revoke  the College and Career Readiness Standards.”

Really? Which business are in Washington DC.? What conference are they attending? Who has informed them that “businesses with an Alabama presence are threatening to pull out of our state if we revoke” the standards? What evidence do they have for this? Where are these businesses going to go instead since a third of the states that have adopted CCSS have decided that two years later they are a bad idea? Wouldn’t it be nice if the HCPTAs actually provided their members with some, oh, I don’t know, actual data supporting their wildly imprecise claims?

“Most significantly, we stand to lose academic competitiveness with the rest of the country.”

Again, where is the evidence for this? The CCSS have never actually been tested. Where is the empirical evidence support this claim that 30 or so states that are currently still participating in CCSS will have higher standards than the 20 who do not? There is nothing to prevent the state of Alabama from setting their standards higher than CCSS, is there?

But here’s the trap. Who can say that our previous standards aren’t as effective at producing scholarships, college acceptances and career opportunities? No one. Because the CCSS standards have not been tested anywhere.

Once again, HCPTAs offers no evidence of any kind to support their (or again, her) claims.

“Where does National PTA stand on Common Core Standards? They support them fully.”

Yes, they do. But the real question is why? What evidence do they have that these standards are better than previous standards?

The reason that they support them fully is simple: they’ve been paid, and paid well, to support them fully.

Why the Common Core State Standards Should Be Revoked

If you take just four things away from this post, and the HCPTAs legislative update, it should be:

1. The Common Core State Standards were developed by the Gates Foundation and organizations funded by Gates. They have been forced upon the states by the Federal Department of Education via the promise (or threat) of funding via Race to the Top grants. All of the CCSS cheerleaders have also been funded by the Gates Foundation to support the implementation of CCSS.
2. The Common Core State Standards have not been tested in any way. There is exactly zero empirical evidence supporting the claims by their supporters that they will increase rigor, reduce remediation at the college level, or help prepare students for either college or career.
3. The Common Core State Standards are intimately tied to Standardized Testing. They are not implemented anywhere without a dramatic increase in testing. Even the CCSS Q&A page admits that the CCSS will result in “Common Assessments.” They claim that these “common assessments” will “Prepare students for college and careers.” (Shame that an assessment doesn’t “prepare” anyone for anything. At best it “assesses the preparedness.” This fundamental misunderstanding of testing is one of the primary reasons the CCSS should be revoked. As Brady states, “The Common Core Standards are a set-up for national standardized tests, tests that can’t evaluate complex thought, can’t avoid cultural bias, can’t measure non-verbal learning, can’t predict anything of consequence (and waste boatloads of money).” If you believe, as I do, that we are testing our district to death, then you should oppose the CCSS.
4. The Common Core State Standards implementation will cost cash-strapped districts across the nation an estimated $16 billion dollars. Dr. Wardynski claimed that if CCSS is revoked by the state legislature, it will mean that Huntsville City Schools alone will have wasted $40 million in just over a year’s time. If we’ve spent $40 million in less than a year on a midrange sized district in simply preparing to implement the standards, imagine how much more this is going to cost. (Where exactly did that $40 million come from, Dr. Wardynski?)

Many of those who oppose this bill (HB254/SB190) are claiming that those who oppose common core are among the “black helicopter” crowd who fear all things federal. They claim, as the HCPTAs do, that opposing common core means that you oppose education standards.

I am a college teacher. I know that some students come to college woefully underprepared. But the reason that they are underprepared isn’t because they weren’t skilled at taking a standardized test.

They’re underprepared because that’s all that they’re skilled at.

And that’s why I oppose the Common Core standards. Our students need teachers who bring a diversity of approaches to educating our children. What we don’t need is for students to be treated as cogs in a machine.

Common Core is assembly line education. An assembly line is wonderful for building a car. It’s a horrible way to build an educated child. The PTA shouldn’t have to be told this. They sold their soul cheaply.

The post Huntsville Council of PTAs Exaggerates Common Core appeared first on Geek Palaver.

If you are having issues downloading the documents from the district’s site (I’ve heard that some are), you may download them directly from this website as well. These are Word Documents, and there are three separate files. The first is “code of student conduct FEB FINAL“. This file contains all of the student conduct information found in the 2012-2013 Student-Parent Handbook plus the new additions of the discipline procedures for technology infractions.

The second document is “technology infractions final“. This contains just the three additional pages that have been added to the Code of Student Conduct. I have also posted the entire contents of this file below.

The final document is “Homeroom Signature Form – technology“. This is the roll sheet that students are being told that they must sign.

These files were downloaded from the district’s website just before noon on February 26, 2013.

Starting at least as early as Thursday, February 21, 2013, the district distributed to the schools a new computer use policy, and they began asking teachers to read this policy to students in their classes. Students as young as five-years old were then asked to sign a roll sheet that states:

Students: (Have students read)

By signing below, I acknowledge I have received, read, and discussed the Huntsville City Schools Technology Discipline Procedures for the 2012/2013 school year.

Students are then told that they must write their name and sign their name stating that they have “received, read, and discussed” the new technology discipline procedures.

New Tech Discipline Procedures

By itself, this is a bit disturbing. As I wrote last week, they are once again changing the ground rules that the students and parents are expected to play by. The problem here is that the district is implementing this new policy, and requiring students to sign it without parental notification or consent.

That’s right, students at least as young as five years old are being asked to sign a notice that they have “received, read, and discussed” these new discipline procedures without getting parents involved. In fact, they are planning to do a robocall about this new policy in the near future, but they are specifically waiting until after the students have “received, read, and discussed” this policy before calling parents.

If a student refuses to sign this roll sheet, they will not be allowed to take his or her computer home with them in the future.

And guess what? By having your child sign a document as a roll sheet, they’ve made it impossible for you as a single parent to ask to see the document, as it contains the names and signatures of up to 30 other students as well. Wardynski has read his Kafka, I presume.

Updated Code of Conduct

The updated code of conduct is 27 pages long. It is basically the Official Student-Parent Handbook that was sent home at the beginning of school with students with three additional pages. You may download just the updated Discipline Procedures for Technology Infractions if you prefer. These pages read:

Huntsville City Schools

Discipline Procedures for Technology Infractions

This is a companion document for Huntsville City Schools Code of Student Conduct.  Refer to the Board Policy and the Code of Student Conduct for additional information.

Technology offenses will be handled as set forth below.  Technology discipline offenses will also result in the restricted use of personal mobile computing devices while on school grounds.

Class I – Minor Offenses 1.19 Technology Infraction (a – e)

a)Unauthorized or inappropriate written/oral communication, use of E-mail, websites, apps, games, messaging services, chat rooms, or other non-school related activity.

School personnel may authorize educational use of the above applications during school hours or otherwise when school is not in session.

b)Use of non-directed profane, inflammatory, or abusive language.

c)Downloading, loading, storing, creating, unauthorized files, images, video, music, apps, data, or programs that do not result in damages to person or property.

d)Unauthorized transmission of personal information over the internet.

e)Activity that may be disruptive to the school environment

Consequences

•Classroom warning

•Possible loss of device access

•Temporary loss of device access

•Parent contact

•Referral to administrator

•Before or after school detention

•In-school suspension not to exceed three (3) days.

Class II – Intermediate Offenses 2.36 Technology Infraction (a – l)

a)Negligent care of or vandalism such as malicious attempt to harm or destroy any HCS device resulting in damage less than $200.

b)Changing software/hardware configurations.

c)Downloading, loading, storing, or creating unauthorized files, images, video, music, apps, data, programs, or viruses resulting in damages to any HCS device.

d)Taking pictures, audio, and/or video without subject’s or school’s permission.

e)Use of unauthorized anonymous and/or false communications such as, but not limited to Google Chat, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.

f)Unauthorized change of program settings or any behavior or activity that damages or disrupts network performance on school devices.

g)Sending, transmitting, accessing, uploading, downloading, or distributing inappropriate, obscene, offensive, profane, threatening, harassing, pornographic, or sexually explicit materials intended to harm or demean staff or students.

h)Deletion, examination, copying, or modifying of files/data/device settings belonging to other users including staff, students, and district to include sharing, using, or modifying usernames and/or passwords.

i)By-passing the HCS Web filter through a Web Proxy.

j)Cheating (refer to HCS Code of Student Conduct, Section II, 2.33)

k)Subsequent offenses that may be disruptive to the school environment.

l)Action violating existing board policy

Consequences

•Temporary loss of device access

•Parent contact

•Referral to administrator

•Before or after school detention

•In-school suspension

•Out of school suspension not to exceed five (5) days

•Possible referral to law enforcement

•Restitution in vandalism instances for actual loss, damage, or repair

•Indemnification – HCS may be indemnified for any losses, costs, or damages including reasonable attorney fees incurred by the district relating to any breach of the Acceptable Use Policy

Class III – Major Offenses 3.25 Technology Infraction (a – h)

a)Any activity that voids the device, service agreement, software license or warranty such as, but not limited to jailbreaking or rooting (process of hacking a device to bypass digital rights management software).

b)Unauthorized entry to program files/hacking.

c)Harassment (refer to HCS Code of Student Conduct, Section III, 3.24)

d)Vandalism such as any malicious attempt to harm or destroy a HCS owned device resulting in damages in excess of $200.

e)Sending, transmitting, accessing, uploading, downloading, distributing, or publishing obscene, offensive, profane, threatening, harassing, pornographic, or sexually explicit materials that result in personal injury to staff or students.

f)Use of school/district’s Internet or email accounts for financial gain or personal gain, or any illegal activity.

g)Offenses on multiple occasions that may be disruptive to the school environment.

h)Any use that violates local, state and/or federal laws or regulations

Consequences

•Loss of device access

•Parent contact

•Referral to administrator

•Before or after school detention

•In-school suspension

•Out of school suspension not to exceed ten (10) days

•Suspension and/or recommendation for Superintendent Level Probation or expulsion and forfeiture of device.

•Restitution in vandalism instances for actual loss, damage, or repair

•Indemnification – HCS may be indemnified for any losses, costs, or damages including reasonable attorney fees incurred by the district relating to any breach of the Acceptable Use Policy

How many five-year olds do you think understand a single word of that change? How many seventeen-year olds? Honestly, how many parents, even?

But wait, there’s more.

$750.00 Fines

In addition to these changes, there’s also the new statement on the splash screen that I wrote about last week.

Thanks to a close reader for pointing out that my interpretation of this splash screen wasn’t actually correct. When I first read this, I believed that they were raising the fee to repair/replace a device from either $250 for the netbooks or $600 for the laptops to $750.00.

However, what this screen actually states is that:

“Intentional misuse of this device (including destruction, defacement, installation of unauthorized software, or download of unauthorized programs) may result in disciplinary action including expulsion and a fine of up to $750.00)” (sic)

What I believe (I could be wrong) that this means is that if a student misuses the laptop, in addition to the “Consequences” listed above there may be a fine of up to $750.00.

If the computer is damaged and “misused” then the district could send you a bill of up to $1,350.00. ($600.00 replacement fee for the laptop and a $750.00 fine.)

This fine is covered under the Consequences for Class II and Class III offenses which state:

Indemnification — HCS may be indemnified for any losses, costs, or damages including reasonable attorney fees incurred by the district relating to any breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.

That’s right. Your five year old has been forced by Huntsville City Schools to sign a document that states that she has “received, read, and discussed” the steps by which she could be expelled from school and charged up to $1,350.00 without your knowledge or consent.

Not Legally Binding Without Consent

Now, clearly this isn’t legally binding. A minor cannot enter into a binding contract of this sort without parental consent. They would be laughed out of any court that they tried to take this to.

So why are they doing it, and why are they doing it without getting parental consent first?

The only reasons that make sense to me are:

1. They’re trying to intimidate the kids.
2. They’re trying to intimidate the parents who don’t know better.
3. They’re hoping to lessen the blowback from the community about these changes by keeping them quiet until the students have already signed off on them in the hopes that they can then say, “Look, your child has already agreed to this, so there’s no need to complain.”
4. They’re just that convinced that they can do whatever they want in our schools.

Honestly, does anyone in their right mind think that these laptops are a good idea now? It’s time to return these netbooks and laptops to the schools and leave them there.

Just make sure that you ask for a receipt when you do.

The post Students Sign New Tech Discipline Procedures Without Consent appeared first on Geek Palaver.

On February 12th, the Alabama House (HB254) and Senate (SB190) Republicans introduced a bill that would repeal the Common Core State Standards Initiative by prohibiting the Alabama State Department of Education from adopting the Common Core and end the collection and sharing of data on students and teachers except in specific circumstances. On February 21st, Dr. Wardynski said that this bill (which no one “consulted” with him on, poor little guy) would make “everything we’re doing illegal.” He was complaining that the district’s curriculum would have to change (which he said costs $40 million dollars over the past two year), and perhaps most importantly that the bill would require them to no longer “collect and retain longitudinal data on students” meaning that they would have to stop using the STAR Enterprise test to track student growth.

Wow. That just sound terrible, doesn’t it?

HB254/SB190

Let’s take a quick look at the bill. (At present the two bills are identical. That may change as the House and Senate begin to make modifications.) You may download copies of the bills to read for yourself (HB254 and SP190). The synopsis of the proposed bill is as follows:

Under existing law, the State Board of Education is directed to establish a core curriculum for every student in grades kindergarten through twelve in the state’s public schools.

This bill would prohibit the State Board of Education from adopting and the Department of Education from implementing the Common Core State Standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

This bill would prohibit the State Board of Education, the Department of Education, and other state bodies from compiling or sharing data about students or teachers, except under limited circumstances.

This bill would prohibit the State Board of Education from entering into an agreement or joining a consortium that would cede any control to an entity outside the state.

This bill would also require notice and public hearings before the State Board of Education adopts or implements any statewide standards.

Wardynski Responds

In response to this, Dr. Wardynski had the following to say on Thursday night:

If you prefer, here’s a transcript of what Dr. Wardynski had to say:

Uh, today, just before our meeting with the folks from the arsenal over at Columbia High School, I did a quick press conference on an item that I think’s vital to, uh, parents’ attention. It’s Senate Bill 190, and Rena knows, wherever you are Rena, what’s the name of the House Bill? 254? HB254?

Uh, it’s a very short bill recommend folks take a good look at it. Um, it has two parts. One pertains to, uh, standards, and the other pertains to data.

Uh, and so what that would mean for our schools system is essentially, we’ve made about a $40 million dollar investment in our curriculum in the last two years, and that would all be for naught. We would have to undo everything we did because we would not be allowed to have materials that are aligned with the Common Core State Standards. So 47 states have agreed [the actual number is 45 + Washington DC. Texas, Alaska, Virginia and Nebraska have not adopted the standards.] on a set of standards which were reached by business leaders and leaders in higher education as to what our K-12 students need to know by the time they leave uh senior year of high school. And those standards are vital because we need to be pointing at something.

Imagine an organization with no objective. That would be us. And, uh, we need very high level objectives because our kids are competing with folks from Korea, China and Germany, and they’re serious about education. And we have any number of firms, I participate with the chamber of commerce, and the city in making proposals all the time for businesses to come here and set up shop. And, way up the list is always K-12 education, and then community colleges and higher ed sorta fall in line. And they’re very interested in what are our standards. The arsenal’s very interested in what are our standards. Kids are, military kids are moving all over the world, all over the country, and you know, quite frankly, they want to know when they’re coming to Alabama, what are the standards? And when we say they’re common core, uh, that settles them right down.

Now the ACT, the ACT Quality Core Exams we’re going to be administering in May and April, uh STAR assessments, we administer every nine weeks, uh, components of the IB program, uh, and many other things are all aligned with the common core standards. So, everything we’re doing would become illegal the day this law passes. And it, if it passes, it’ll pass in the next several weeks, so in the middle of the semester, in the middle of the academic year, everything we’re doing will be illegal. And we’ll have to stop.

No, there’s no um, I’m not looking for interruptions. (A woman in the audience tried to ask a question at this point. In typical fashion, Dr. Wardynski overruled her.)

Um, and um, so that would be the end of that. And uh, the digital curriculum we’re in, part of the advantage of that is, if someone makes an improvement in Massachusetts to a component of digital learning that’s aligned with a set of standards, we don’t have to pay for that again. It comes here, and it’s already been bought and paid for in Massachusetts. If we want to become and island in education all onto our own, we will have to pay for everything that’s created. The texts, the curriculum, the digital components, the tests, the formative assessments, everything.

Uh, that’s just not the way to use our money wisely.

Part two is, we would no longer be able to collect and retain longitudinal data on students. Longitudinal data means we’re looking at your student over time. So we’re very interested in their growth. We would now have no idea what their growth is.

Um, iNow collects longitudinal data, so the data you find in the student information system we have, that you have passwords for, called iNow would become illegal. We would not be able to put any money into maintaining that or operating it.

Renaissance Learning [STAR Testing] which has longitudinal data on your student’s progress in reading and math, we would have to stop funding that, and stop using that data.

I don’t see how we could participate in ACT testing. So I don’t know how your children will get in college. Because that retains longitudinal data and is also aligned with the common core. SAT, AP, IB, you name it, it’ll be done.

This bill, uh, nobody consulted this superintendent from this area about whether this was a good idea. Uh, I don’t know of anybody in my staff that was consulted. Um, so I’m thinking this is about as bad as you can do for education. Just about as bad a deal as we can do for our kids. So I recommend, just quickly, go and google these things, uh, SB190 and uh, HB254. Quick reads. We had our attorney interpret it. I read it and said, “Does it really mean this?” And our attorney said, “Yes, it does.”

And so, I’m going down on Tuesday to meet with folks and see, you know, if there’s anything we can do about it. I know our state superintendent is working on it. The other superintendents I talked to today, David Copeland and Dee Fowler, we’re gonna go to work on this thing. But uh, we just don’t need this. The Calendar Bill is nothing compared to this.

Huntsville Council of PTAs Chimes In

In addition, yesterday just a few hours after the Superintendent offered his opinion, at least one person representing the Huntsville Council of PTAs (how exactly does the council go about deciding which bills it endorses in this manner? Was there a vote?) had this to say about the Common Core Bill:

Common Core Standards were adopted by the Alabama Legislature last year. Alabama was one of 45 states, along with District of Columbia and 4 U.S. Territories, to adopt the standards. Core classes are defined as Math, Science, English and History. The Common Core Standards only pertain to Math and English Core classes.

The Common Core standards are not a federal mandate, they were written by the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Representatives from the National PTA office also participated in the crafting of Common Core standards. National PTA supports the continued implementation of Comon (sic) Core Standards in every state.

So what exactly is Common Core. In a nutshell, the standards create grade level curriculum consistency across the country. The common core standards have more rigor than previous curriculum; giving our students the skills they need for college, and for a future career. Students were leaving high school unprepared for college, and would have to take remedial classes or additional classes, adding extra semesters and extra cost. The business community was concerned about how unprepared students were for the workforce. The common core is one way to begin to repair those problems.

House Bill 254 and the Senate Bill 190 seek to revoke the common core standards in Alabama. The bills go further to state it will be against the law for the State Board of Education or an local school system to continue to use the common core standards. The bill also makes it illegal to keep cumulative data on students. Our AR testing, Star Testing, and college entrance exams, the ACT and the SAT, all keep cumulative data. Should this bill pass, all those tests, by definition, would be illegal in our state. There would be no way to measure student progress.

The Huntsville Council of PTAs supports student enrichment and parental engagement. As such, the HCPTA supports the continued implementation of the Common Core standards in Alabama. In a military town like Huntsville, it is important for our military families, and other families transferring in, to have continuity in their education. It is also important for all students to be challenged and have rigor in their curriculum. Please read the bills referenced below, and let your representative and senator know your opinions on the bill and how, as your representative, you would like them to vote. The House bill is in the Education Policy committee and the Senate Bill is in the Education Committee.

[As an aside, isn't it interesting how the Huntsville Council of PTAs always supports Dr. Wardynski's legislative agenda? So much so that they even pick up many of the same talking points as they did when they suggested that Common Core is crucial to our military families? It's almost as if the State Legislative Updates of the Huntsville Council of PTAs were being written by someone in Dr. Wardynski's office. When was the last time that the HCPTA actually opposed anything the superintendent wanted?]

So there you have it, the common core bill, Dr. Wardynski’s “the sky is falling” response and the Huntsville Council of PTAs hyperbolic claim that if this bill passes, “there would be no way to measure student progress.”

Let’s see if we can unpack this mess a bit.

What is Common Core?

Common core is a set of national standards that is being adopted by most of the states as appropriate grade level curriculum. In other words, if a student should move from Alabama to Maine in the third grade, that student will still be covering similar curriculum regardless of which state she lives in.

This seems, on the surface, like a good thing, doesn’t it? It solves all sorts of problems, right? Without it, who knows what material these students who move all over the country will face.

Except, common core standards are attempting to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist.

You see, the curriculum across grade level is fairly uniform across the United States already. And it has been for a long time. Try this test: find a friend who grew up in another state and ask them when they started learning, say, long division? If you are about the same age and about the same educational achievement, more than likely you will have both started long division in about the same grade.

This has been so for a long, long time thanks primarily to a consolidation of textbook publishers. If you go shopping for a 4th grade math book, you’ll find, even before Common Core came on the scene, that they all covered the same basic material.

So what problem does Common Core solve? Well, having all the states adopt the same standards makes life easier for those textbook publishers, like Pearson. No longer do they have to adapt a text to a certain state. The states are now required by law to adapt to the publisher.

This makes life easier for publishers, and the other cornucopia of Educational Specialists who have popped up overnight ready to help your district succeed. At a price, of course.

Who Developed the Common Core State Standards?

While the common core site claims that “teachers, parents and community leaders have all weighed in to help create the Common Core State Standards,” on this point, Dr. Wardynski is actually being a bit more honest. He’s right when he claims that they are “a set of standards which were reached by business leaders and leaders in higher education as to what our K-12 students need to know.”

He’s right, these standards were developed by business leaders–who were funded by Bill Gates, and leaders in higher education–who were funded by Bill Gates. As Susan Ohanian says in “Whoo-Hoo! Occupy the Schools“:

The Common Core State (sic) Standards are the result of hundreds of millions of dollars disbursed in carefully distributed grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation accompanied by the threat from U. S. Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold federal funds if individual states did not sign on the dotted line.

These aren’t grassroots standards that the federal government has adopted. They are, instead, standards that were developed by the Gates Foundation and forced on the rest of us. Diane Ravitch makes it even clearer when she writes in The Death and Life of the Great American School System, “Gates funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them.”

According to Ohanian again, Gates gave money to support Common Core to just about everyone who was supporting it (including, by the way, the PTA). She looked at two months of press citations praising Common Core from August and September 2012 and compared that to Gates Foundation records given to those who praised Common Core. She writes:

The list ranges from the American Federation of Teachers ($1,000,000) to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction ($823,637), from the neo-liberal Center for American Progress ($2,998,809) to the neo-conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute ($5,711,462). The PTA got money ($2,005,000); so did the National Writing Project ($2,645,593). And so on and so on. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and with money in their pockets, many are eager to sing the Common Core song and eat the funeral meats.

Wardynski makes the truth even clearer when he says:

And we have any number of firms, I participate with the chamber of commerce, and the city in making proposals all the time for businesses to come here and set up shop. And, way up the list is always K-12 education, and then community colleges and higher ed sorta fall in line. And they’re very interested in what are our standards. The arsenal’s very interested in what are our standards. Kids are, military kids are moving all over the world, all over the country, and you know, quite frankly, they want to know when they’re coming to Alabama, what are the standards? And when we say they’re common core, uh, that settles them right down. [Emphasis Added]

You see, this isn’t about what’s best for the student. It’s about what’s best for business and industry, and the chamber of commerce.

Why Business Cares?

Why does business and industry care about anything? Why does the chamber care about anything? Because there is money to be made.

This is why Gates has pushed for Common Core; this is why Pearson, Broad, Microsoft, HP, and just about every other contractor the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education has hired over the past two years pushes for Common Core: there’s money to be made. According to Dr. Wardynski’s own statement in Huntsville alone, this has amounted to a $40 million dollar investment in two years time.

Now multiply that figure by every district in all 46 of the states across the nation and what do you find? That “investment in our curriculum” grows to the billions quite fast.

Now we’re getting into numbers that even Bill Gates cares about, aren’t we?

See now why Common Core is such an important issue?

Why Are Alabama Republicans opposed to Common Core Standards?

It’s hard to say, but I suspect that they oppose these standards being forced on the state by the federal government. Somehow I doubt that they would oppose them if, say, a republican President were pushing for them, but you know what they say, Politics makes strange bed-fellows.

Corporate education reform doesn’t break along party lines. Both the democrats and the republicans have been pushing for this new model for years. (Diane Ravitch traces it back to at least Clinton’s push for a national graduation test.) But since a democrat is currently pushing for it, the Alabama Republicans are opposed.

However, everyone who cares more about their child’s education than they do national politics should rejoice and call their Alabama representatives and tell them to support this bill.

You see, the idea behind Common Core isn’t the worst idea in the world, but the way it is being implemented here in Huntsville is. Here in Huntsville, Common Core means exactly one thing: The right to administer standardized testing until the district dies. This is why both Wardynski and the Huntsville Council of PTAs spent so much time discussing the “longitudinal data” component of the bill.

High Stakes Testing and Common Core

I suppose that it’s possible that the Common Core Standards are being applied somewhere in the 45 states they’ve been adopted without extensive, high-stakes testing rolling right along with it, but I doubt it. Common Core and High Stakes Testing (like our beloved STAR test) go hand in hand. One does not exist without the other. Either way, it’s really difficult to know if they could exist independently of each other because you see these “standards” are being implemented without any trial of any kind.

That’s right. Bill Gates, the federal government, and countless corporate education reformers are putting into place a program that will cost between $8 and $16 Billion dollars, without doing any form of trial run first.

I wonder, Rocket City, how would such a proposal go over if, lets say, NASA wanted to send Rover to Mars (for a mere $2.5 billion) without any form of trial run?

Would anyone think it a wise decision?

So why is it okay to turn the entire nation’s (minus four states) education system over to an untested, unproven theory? As Diane Ravitch asks, “how can I possibly pass judgement until I find out how the standards work in real classrooms with real children and real teachers?”

None of these theories have been tested yet. And the limited, transitional implementation that has been started here in Huntsville has resulted in 158 people retiring or immediately resigning since September 4, 2012. Or as Wardynski himself proudly proclaimed in December, 246 teachers have retired or resigned since he arrived. That number is climbing and will skyrocket at the end of this year.

Clearly, the limited test of the common core implementation has been a huge success for those who believe that an inexperienced teacher is better than an experienced one.

And that’s the real issue here. Common Core isn’t designed to improve education. If the standards do indeed raise “rigor” as the #CorpEdReformers like to claim, they do so because they have good teachers examining and implementing the curriculum changes in a specific way to meet the specific needs of her students. This cannot happen without experienced teachers leading the way. And if Common Core has proven good at anything it is at driving teachers out of the profession.

Simply claiming something adds “rigor” to a curriculum is like claiming that I’m 500% better looking today than I was yesterday.

“Rigor” is a meaningless buzzword being used by Wardynski and others to make something sound better than it is. Don’t be fooled by it.

Alabama Leads by Repealing Common Core

If you believe that what Wardynski is doing in this city is good for education and good for students, then by all means, call your legislators and tell them to vote against repealing the Common Core Standards Initiative HB254/SB190. Dr. Wardynski, the Huntsville Council of PTAs and Bill Gates will, I am sure, thank you for your support. Heck, Bill Gates might even send you a check. He’s certainly bought off everyone else who supports this untested venture.

If, on the other hand, you think that the changes Wardynski has wrought are dangerous, risky, untested, and harmful to our kids; if you believe that endless pointless testing kills education rather than enhances it; if you believe that children are individuals and should be evaluated as individual; if you believe that testing a child may tell you how that child is doing, but not how the teacher is teaching, then I ask you to contact your legislators and ask them to support repealing the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Don’t believe the superintendent when he tells you the sky is falling. Don’t believe the Huntsville Council of PTAs when they claim that there will be “no way to measure student progress.” Common Core didn’t exist in this state prior to 2010. I’m pretty sure that Huntsville students were well represented at colleges and universities all around the world before we bent over backwards to make life easier for textbook publishers. Believe me, they will be again.

Repealing the Common Core State Standards Initiative will be good for Alabama. And other states are starting to see it that way, too. This is Alabama’s chance to lead the way to a new educational benchmark rather than follow the lemmings over the hill.

The post Alabama Leads by Repealing Common Core (HB254/SB190) appeared first on Geek Palaver.

So it seems that the superintendent has decided to change the computer deal in the middle of the year. But of course he hasn’t decided to share it with any, you know, legally responsible adult.

Instead, he’s decided to just threaten children and have third graders walking around wondering what they have done wrong.

If you remember, back in the summer there was much confusion over the agreement that parents were being ordered to sign for their children to take home the computer that they were being forced to use. There was no getting around this agreement. When we asked if we could use our own computer instead of the school’s computer, we were told:

HCS cannot support other computers. Feel free to buy your own computer; however, we have to use the HCS imaged computers in our schools. They are set up to be used in our schools – they have to go through our servers/filters. We won’t maintain any computers besides HCS devices.

In other words, if you have a child in Huntsville City Schools, you have no choice. You must pay a “$35 User Fee” and you must use the school’s computer.

Remember how the agreement that we were asked to sign ended up being different from the one that was posted on the website? The original one was dated, July 23, 2012 and had an introductory paragraph that read:

A computer power cord and carrying case will be issued to students to support the 1:1 Technology Initiative being implemented in Huntsville City Schools. The student curriculum will be accessible digitally for all core subject areas, on the computer. The computer should be kept away from food and drinks and stored in its carrying case when not in use. Computer Lab Technicians will assist with hardware and software troubleshooting and support. There will be a $35.00 user fee to help cover repairs and or replacements. The school district will help make special accommodations for free and reduced lunch students.

However once parents began picking up the devices, they noticed that the agreement they were being asked to sign had changed to this:

In support of the 1:1 Digital Learning Initiative being implemented in Huntsville City Schools, students will receive a computer, power cord and carrying case. The student curriculum will be accessible digitally for all core subject areas, on the computer. Parents/guardians and students must review and sign this contract.  Parents unwilling to sign the contract must assume responsibility for student’s being able to gain access to the digital curriculum. Computer Lab Technicians will assist with hardware and software troubleshooting and support. There will be a $35.00 user fee to help cover repairs. The school district will provide accommodations for free and reduced lunch students and any student attending Title I Schools. The cost to replace the Netbook computer for Grades 3 is $250. The cost to replace the laptop for Grades 4-12 is $600.

From the beginning the district was either constantly changing the agreement or refusing to be upfront with parents about the agreement they were entering into.

But that was the agreement that we signed, and that was the agreement that is applicable for the 2012-2013 school year.

Except, now, as always, Dr. Wardynski has decided to change the agreement, again.

Beginning last week when students turned on their computers, they were suddenly greeted with a new desktop background as seen above. Included on that background is the following statement:

This device is the property of Huntsville City School Board of Education, a political subdivision of the Alabama State Department of Education. It has been provided to you, as a student of the Huntsville City School District, in order to enhance your educational achievement through utilization of District-approved digital curriculum. Intentional misuse of this device (including destruction, defacement, installation of unauthorized software, or download of unauthorized programs) may result in disciplinary action including expulsion and a fine of up to $750.00) [sic]

That’s right. The cost of replacing your child’s laptop or netbook (this screen shot also appears on the netbook) has jumped from either $250/$600 to $750. And in addition to that, actions that were listed as Class II violations (suspension) have now, automatically, been raised to a Class III violation (expulsion).

Does anyone else have the feeling that this wonderful, amazing 1:1 Digital Initiative just keeps getting worse all the time? Remember when the superintendent constantly underestimated the cost of the Digital Curriculum by four million dollars? Remember when Wardynski claimed that everyone would have wireless access to the curriculum, even though the network regularly and consistently crashed during the first half of the school year? Remember when Wardynski called a parent’s suggestion that this conversion should be handled in a more judicious fashion, “ludicrous” and “absurd?”

Well, it seems that the superintendent has decided to change the ground rules yet again.

Honestly, is there any promise, any agreement, that this man won’t break? I feel like Lando making a deal with Darth Vader and hearing Vader say, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

__________

There’s a board meeting Thursday night, February 21st at 5:30pm at the Merts Building. While most of the meeting will be broadcast, the citizens’ comments will not. If you want to hear what your fellow citizens have to say to the board, you’ll have to join us in person for the meeting. Hope to see you there. 

The post The New Computer Deal: Higher Fees and Expulsion appeared first on Geek Palaver.

At a parent’s meeting tonight to discuss the changes that will soon take place in the Johnson High School feeder patterns, Dr. Wardynski shared with about 30 parents at Rolling Hills Elementary that he is planning to close every middle school in the district. The man who claimed that he wouldn’t be closing schools, sure is doing a lot of it. He intends to either merge the middle schools with the elementary schools creating a Pre-K — 8th, and 9th — 12th model, or, as he is planning to do with Davis Hills Middle (and soon after Ed White Middle) he is developing a Pre-K/K — 6th grade elementary school and a 7th — 12th grade high school.

As the Director of Operations Jeffery Wilson explained tonight, “Because the idea is that if we build a new Johnson that opens in 2016 it’s the 4th and 5th grade parents and students who will be very greatly affected by that. There kids would go through their 7 to 12 experience at the new Johnson.”

Yes, the Director of Operations, under the direction of Dr. Wardynski and not the Directors of Curriculum and Instruction, is the person driving the decisions in this district. Once again decisions that should be made with the best interests of the education of the student are instead being made with the best interests of the director of operations and of course the almighty developers in mind.

This pattern will then be replicated across the district effectively closing eight schools across the district. This list of schools includes:

• Challenger Middle
• Davis Hills Middle
• Ed White Middle
• Hampton Cove Middle
• Huntsville Middle (I suppose he has a new school in mind for his boy Aaron King to run along with the help of two assistant principals, of course.)
• Providence Middle (This one is already in the works.)
• Westlawn Middle (Funny, I thought we were just celebrating how wonderful they were doing on their own.)
• Williams Middle

This list doesn’t include the new Pre-K — 8th schools that were “transformed” this year at Mt. Gap, The Chapman Schools, and Whitesburg.

Remember when Wardynski claimed back in September 2011 that “school closings are not really a panacea,” and that “we want to have exhausted every other hope we have” before closing schools? Remember when he proclaimed that the demographer’s report for which we paid $75,000 had “fallen by the wayside?”

Remember when the entire city got up in arms at the thought of closing nine schools in the district? Now Dr. Wardynski is planning to close twice that number with the schools that he has already closed, slated to close, relocated, or merged.

I wonder what schools will be on the chopping block next?

In fact, can anyone share with me any promise that Dr. Wardynski has ever made to parents that has actually been fulfilled? Even a basic promise such as “we’ll have laptops ready to substitute should one break” still hasn’t been met with regularity.

We have a superintendent, a board of education and a central office who steadfastly refuse to ask “will this help students learn?” Maybe the central office can be excused out of fear of what Wardynski will do to them if they should ask a question. I’ve been repeatedly told that he is quite happy to cuss his staff out when necessary. But surely at least one member of the board of education can find the intestinal fortitude to follow a simple suggestion that I offered for the first time nearly two years ago, PUT STUDENTS FIRST!

And the Board and Superintendent respond with silence.

I guess that closing schools is indeed a panacea after all.

Almost makes you miss Dr. Richardson, doesn’t it?

The post Wardynski Closing Every Middle School in the District appeared first on Geek Palaver.

When the superintendent wishes to throw himself a party, he tends to do it right. Last Thursday during the Board’s Work Session meeting (which they call “work sessions” so they can exclude public comments at the end), the Superintendent had Alabama Representatives singing his praises for his PTA Superintendent of the Year award last year, had board members singing his praises for winning yet another “major award” from eSchoolNews for being a “tech-savvy” superintendent of the year, and got to sing his own praises by telling the district just how amazing the school turnaround at Westlawn Middle is going. There was precious few non-scripted moments during the school board meeting this past Thursday, which is exactly what the superintendent wants: control.

(About the only non-scripted moment must have really chapped Dr. Wardynski’s backside as it ruined his plan to leverage local support for overturning the School Calendar “Opt-Out” bill into support for the Local Control School Flexibility Act. After Wardynski and Robinson made their claims that if you like having local control over the school calendar, then you should support the Flexibility Act, Senator Holtzclaw stood to point out that the Calendar “Opt-Out” bill and the School Flexibility Act are two separate bills. You could see Dr. Robinson’s face fall when he said this as she had been doing her best–as was Dr. Wardynski–to claim that the two bills were one. Thanks to Sen. Holtzclaw for stopping this farce. If only either of them bothered to read the local paper from time to time, they would have known that there were in fact two separate bills. I guess it’s too much to ask that our superintendent and school board actually read.)

For those who don’t know, a “turnaround” school is what happens to schools when they fail to achieve their AYP goals under Obama’s Race to the Top grant programs. Basically, a turnaround school loses all of its existing administration and the overwhelming majority of its teachers. In turn, the district receives a little over $1.5 million dollars for use at that school for personnel, extended learning time and “incentives” (bonuses paid to teachers for good results on the STAR test–yes, some teachers, not all, get a bonus if your child does better on a test).

The turnaround model isn’t beloved by everyone. Many low-income, minority communities across the nation are balking at the loss of local control and lack of parental involvement and input. And it seems that the data, and you know we’re all about DATA here in Huntsville, doesn’t support the claim that removing everyone from a school actually improves student performance.

But that was exactly what Dr. Wardynski was claiming on Thursday night. Here’s the video of Ms. Lynette Alexander walking the board and the enthusiastic faculty of Westlawn through the all important data that shows that the turnaround model is working. (If you would like to download the PowerPoint that Ms. Alexander was using, you may get a copy from here.)

STAR testing is AMAZING isn’t it? As are all the changes that Wardynski has made at Westlawn, including bringing in Teach for America (who made the first part of the presentation that night), and of course our beloved technology. These components led Cathy McNeal so aptly say, “I’ve never seen growth like this. It’s phenomenal.”

It’s Phenomenal

Now that we’re beyond the passion of the moment and we can think rationally about this report, let’s consider what we’ve heard.

Suddenly, because of just a few minor changes, miracles are occurring that lead a 40 year educational veteran to claim that she’s never seen growth like this.

Someone needs to let MsDr. McNeal know that when things look too good to be true . . . well, you know the cliché, don’t you?

There are a lot of interesting claims being made in this presentation. First, we start with Wardynski’s beloved STAR Enterprises Test that he brought to the district last year. This is a test that is administered across the district basically whenever the superintendent decides that he wants more data to play with. Officially it was supposed to be administered three times during the year: September, January, and March. However, the test has already been administered three times in September, October and January. It will likely be administered at least twice more in March and at the end of the year when our elementary students will sit for at least three consecutive weeks of testing with STAR, ARMT+ and the new ACT test.

District Testing

Setting aside for a moment the questions and doubts that any parent has with a district that is evaluating teachers on student test scores (remember when tests were used to evaluate students?), the district in its infinite wisdom has scheduled some form of testing every single month students are in school. Here’s a list:

• STAR Enterprise Benchmark l, Grades K-2 September 10 – 14, 2012
• STAR Enterprise Benchmark l, Grades 3-12 September 12 – 14, 2012
• DIBELS Next (K-1) and DIBELS Grade 2 Sept 17-21, 2012
• Alabama High School Graduation Exam (AHSGE) September 17-21
  • Mathematics Monday, 9/17/12
  • Reading Tuesday, 9/18/12
  • Language Wednesday, 9/19/12
  • Social Studies Thursday, 9/20/12
  • Science/Biology (both tests) Friday, 9/21/12
• PSAT October 17, 2012
• EXPLORE Grade 8 & PLAN Grade 10 – Career Inventory Section October 18, 2012
• EXPLORE Test, Grade 8 Academic Section October 23, 2012
• PLAN, Grade 10 Academic Section October 23, 2012
• EXPLORE & PLAN Make-Up Day October 24, 2012
• Alabama High School Graduation Exam (AHSGE) December 3-7, 2012
  • Science/Biology (both tests) Monday, 12/3/12
  • Mathematics Tuesday, 12/4/12
  • Reading Wednesday, 12/5/12
  • Language Thursday, 12/6/12
  • Social Studies Friday, 12/7/12
• DIBELS Next (K-1) and DIBELS Grade 2 January 3 – 11, 2013
• STAR Enterprise Benchmark ll, Grades K-12 January 14-18, 2013
• Alabama High School Graduation Exam (AHSGE) March 18-22, 2013
  • Science/Biology (both tests) Monday, 3/18/13
  • Mathematics Tuesday, 3/19/13
  • Reading Wednesday, 3/20/13
  • Social Studies Thursday, 3/21/13
  • Language Friday, 3/22/13
• STAR Assessment Grades K-8 ONLY March 18-22, 2013
• ACCESS for ELLs March 25 – May 3, 2013
• Alternate ACCESS for ELLS March 25 – May 3, 2013
• Alabama Alternate Assessment (AAA) April 15 – May 3, 2013
• DIBELS Next (K-1) and DIBELS Grade 2 April 15 – 24, 2013
• HCS ACT QualityCore End-of Course Assessments 2 – 45 minute tests – April 29 – May 2, 2013
  • English 11 (HCS Wavier Assessment) To be Announced
  • English 12 To be Announced
  • Algebra II (HCS Wavier Assessment) To be Announced
  • Pre Calculus To be Announced Chemistry To be Announced
  • Physics To be Announced US History (HCS Waiver Assessment) To be Announced
• MANDATED ACT End-of-Course tests (1 day each) SDE will announce dates To be Announced
  • English 9 To be Announced
  • English 10 To be Announced
  • Algebra I To be Announced
  • Geometry To be Announced
  • Biology (HCS Waiver Assessment) To be Announced
  • International Baccalaureate (IB) Provisional April 30-May 22, 2013
• STAR Assessment Grades K-12 April 29 – May 3, 2013
• STAR Early Literacy April 29 – May 3, 2013
• AP Exam May 6 – 17, 2013
• Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test+ (ARMT+) Gr 3-8 May 6-14, 2013
  • ARMT+ Reading May 6, 2013
  • ARMT+ Reading May 7, 2013
  • ARMT+ Math May 8, 2013
  • ARMT+ Math May 9, 2013
  • ARMT+ Make Up May 10, 2013
  • ARMT+ Science (Grades 5 & 7) May 13, 2013
  • ARMT+ Make Up May 14, 2013

This is the official list, but it doesn’t include everything like the additional STAR Assessment that was administered in October. If you total the days by age group, you’ll find the following:

• K-2: 43 of 180 days
• 3rd-8th: 42 of 180 days
• 9th-12th: 59 of 180 days.

This is what the district was “celebrating” last Thursday.

And if you think that’s bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Race to the Bottom

Remember when Ms. Alexander was talking about the “phenomenal” growth? I wonder how such growth could be achieved?

Well, it happens because every student who doesn’t benchmark on the first STAR test in September (or presumably October) has the benefit of taking a STAR practice test every single week of the year.

That’s right. Our lowest performing students are taking the STAR test every single week until they begin to “grow” in their performance. The STAR test evaluates two subjects: reading and mathematics. It doesn’t evaluate science, technology, history, biology, physics, social studies, civics, or even a skill as basic as writing. We are testing students from kindergarten through twelfth grade (yes, some 12th graders are being evaluated regular on their ability to read).

You know the educational reformers, like Wardynski, used to claim that their reforms would make our schools the envy of the world. I wonder how many other nations in the world are envious of twelfth graders who can read? Race to the Bottom would be far more appropriate and honest, don’t you think?

But wait, it gets far, far worse.

“Phenomenal” Growth Explained

Remember that growth that was too good to be true. Well, once you realize that these students are practicing this test every week, it becomes a bit easier to understand.

But even growth at that level isn’t sufficient to gain Wardynski’s praise. It has to be higher. And so, we add to this mixture “incentives” for teachers to increase their growth. At Westlawn alone, as a part of the “turnaround,” teachers are receiving financial incentives to improve their students’ grades. So far the district has distributed $80,000.00 of a budgeted $355,392.00 to incentivize teachers to help their students grow.

Westlawn has 43 “teaching staff.” If half of them have received an incentive to improve test scores, we’re taking about a $4,000 bonus for half a year’s work with an additional $275,392 remaining to be spent during the second half of the year.

Imagine how much of an incentive it would be to someone making $36,144 a year to be offered a $4,000 bonus. That’s an 11% raise. And that’s assuming that half of the teachers are receiving this bonus. There’s no way the number is that high.

But wait again, there’s still more.

In addition to being “incentivized,” some teachers at some schools are being allowed (or are breaking the rules and doing it anyway) to give the actual STAR test to their students multiple times. When a student takes the test multiple times, even if the test is randomized, they’re going to show growth.

This is the environment that Wardynski has instituted in our district. It’s an environment where school is pitted against school. (You’re only “successful” if your scores are higher than other schools.) It’s an environment where teacher is pitted against teacher. (You’re only successful if you’re better than your peers. That’s why some teachers names appear on the STAR data report while most don’t. Only the best are worth acknowledging.)

It’s an environment where teachers have a significant financial incentive to produce “growth” as measured by a flawed tool. It’s an environment where teachers jobs are being threatened if they don’t produce “phenomenal” growth. It’s an environment where a tool that was designed to evaluate students is instead being used as the primary evaluation tool for teachers. (Can some of our world famous engineers please explain to Wardynski–who likes to claim that he is one–the fallacy of using a tool designed to evaluate students being used to evaluate teachers?)

Testing To Death

This will result in the death of education in our district.

1. Education is only concerned with passing the test in Huntsville City Schools. We test constantly leaving no time for anything else. Forget about art, music, or dance, there isn’t time for social studies, history, or science. That’s right, Rocket City doesn’t have time for science anymore.
2. Testing isn’t focused on evaluating students anymore but rather teachers.
3. Teachers are being placed in a position where cheating to improve test scores will be seen as a necessary survival tool. And we know from our neighbors in Atlanta just how that will turn out.

The district knows that these are issues, but they continue to head down a path towards destruction simply because our “Strong Leader” wishes it. No one is willing to stand up to him and tell him that his policies are killing our schools.

Opt-Out

So what can we do?

1. It’s time to organize and boycott the test. The STAR test, no matter how wonderfully your child is doing, is not being used to evaluate your child. It’s being used to evaluate your child’s teacher. In other words, your child is being used as a tool to abuse the very people who are trying to help them. It’s time to say that you opt-out of this abusive system.
2. It’s time that teachers, like their brothers and sisters in Seattle, Chicago, and New York band together and opt out as well.
3. It’s far past time for organizations that claim to support teachers like the Huntsville Education Association and the Alabama Education Association to quit making it easy for Dr. Wardynski to use our children to abuse our teachers. Twice last Thursday, Dr. Wardynski praised Rex Cheatham, HEA Uniserve Director, and Shirley Wellington, President of HEA, for their cooperation and support as they move the district toward a model that bases evaluations of teachers on student test scores. Who exactly are AEA and HEA working for here?

We can still save our schools, but we have to work together. Parents have to realize that having a child score on a 10th grade reading level and an 9th grade math level in the 4th grade doesn’t mean anything at all except that your child can take a standardized test. It doesn’t mean that they’re 5 or 6 grade levels ahead.

You’re being lied to. What it means is that the district is not teaching them science, history, social studies, art, music or even writing.

We can still save our schools if teachers realize that they do have power to fight this abuse.

We can still save our schools if organizations designed to stand for teachers actually begin doing so.

We can still save our schools if we care more about education than we do turning a profit for business and industry, which is all that Wardynski and the Board of Education are concerned about.

The post STAR Testing A District To Death appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Remember Frank Spinelli? You know, the CSFO that Dr. Wardynski “brought” with him to Huntsville from Aurora, Colorado at a cost of $130,000 a year? Remember the night that Dr. Wardynski made a point of saying he was ignoring any rumors about sexual harassment that involve “strong leaders” such as Mr. Spinelli?

Do you remember that Dr. Robinson told us that Mr. Spinelli “has authority for certain expenditures” which include the hiring of the LEANFrog auditors who were supposedly at the time finding that there was “significant opportunity for fraud” in the district?

How about the time when Mr. Spinelli claimed that there were “no documents responsive to your request” concerning $28,790.00 of district funding that had been paid to LEANFrog over four months spanning 2011/2012? Clearly the “significant opportunity for fraud” in the district didn’t include spending nearly $30 grand without any paperwork of any kind.

Still don’t remember who we’re talking about? Well then what about last October when Mr. Spinelli offered his resignation and then, the same night, his consulting company was hired at a rate of $175 an hour?

That was quite a raise for Mr. Spinelli who, according to Dr. Wardynski, had family concerns that he needed to take care of in New York.

State Code Violations

At least it was until Mr. Culbreath, the new District Five board member started asking questions of the Alabama Ethics Commission about the legality of paying Mr. Spinelli as a consultant to his former employer within two years of his employment. Alabama Code Section 36-25-13, “Actions of Former Public Officials or Public Employees Prohibited for Two Years After Departure” is fairly clear when it says in paragraph (a):

No public official shall serve for a fee as a lobbyist or otherwise represent clients, including his or her employer before the board, agency, commission, department, or legislative body, of which he or she is a former member for a period of two years after he or she leaves such membership. For the purposes of this subsection, such prohibition shall not include a former member of the Alabama judiciary who as an attorney represents a client in a legal, non-lobbying capacity.

Thanks to the questions Mr. Culbreath asked back in October 2012, Mr. Spinelli’s contract as a consultant with the board was ended. In Mrs. McCaulley’s words, the board “severed all ties.”

Except they didn’t.

The Tie That Binds

I was watching, as always, to see if the four-year contract that had been approved in September 20th Temporary Agreements (four years doesn’t seem too temporary to me, but whatever) would be formally rescinded. Strangely enough, it never was. My thinking at the time was, “well, maybe they’re just running behind.”

But then, Mr. Spinelli showed up for the January 8th board meeting. Now, there’s no rule that says that he can’t attend a public board meeting, but since he so often seemed to be somewhat put out by having to attend the meetings when he was employed by the district, it seemed strange that he would choose to attend a meeting without being paid to be there.

Maybe he was just going to dinner afterwords with Wardynski and Aaron King, who was there to tell us how great Wardynski’s Digital Initiative was at Huntsville Middle School? Who knows. It seemed like old home week once the meeting adjourned.

Except maybe he was being paid to be there after all.

Spinelli and LEANFrog

You remember the LEANFrog contract that paid Mr. Headrick $28,790.00 in funds, without any documentation whatsoever? (Of course you do, I just reminded you.) Well, that number has dramatically increased since February 2012. You see, since November 2011 until October 2012, LEANFrog has been paid $715,308.59 according to the district’s check registers.

Nearly three quarters of a million dollars in one year paid to LEANFrog to find “significant opportunity for fraud.”

And now it seems that Mr. Spinelli, whose own company’s hiring was deemed unethical and illegal, has now returned to Huntsville City Schools as a LEANFrog consultant.

Yep, the company to which Mr. Spinelli oversaw the payment of $715,308.59 for the period of one year has now hired Mr. Spinelli to work with Huntsville City Schools.

Reportedly, Mr. Spinelli currently holds a five-year contract with LEANFrog to work with the district. I don’t have any word at the moment on what kind of salary he’s pulling in. Anyone wanna bet it’s around $175 an hour?

Is it illegal for LEANFrog to have hired Spinelli? Well, I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on TV, but I can, you know, read. And when I read the code cited above, it seems to me that if it was illegal to hire Spinelli’s company as a consultant firm, it’s also illegal for LEANFrog to hire him as well.

But let’s assume that the board actually did their due diligence. (Nope can’t type it without laughing either.)

Let’s assume that it is completely legal for Spinelli to work for a company that he basically hired to work for the district.

Unanswered Questions

This turn of events raises several interesting questions.

1. How can it be ethical for a company to hire the person who gave them such a lucrative contract? I know this happens all the time in Washington, but this is Huntsville. I’d like to believe we have slightly higher standards than our legislators. (Nope, couldn’t type that without laughing either.)
2. Why is a company like LEANFrog, who makes their living on their reputation, so willing to throw their reputation out the window like this?
3. Why does Spinelli, who voluntarily resigned his position, want to be a district employee again so badly? (I never got the impression that he actually liked living in Huntsville.)
4. Why is Mike Culbreath, the one ray of light on this school board, suddenly so silent on the rehiring of the employee he single-handedly kicked out just three months ago? (So much for being “worth watching.”)
5. (And this is the big one.) Why is Wardynski so dead set, so willing to violate state code, state ethics laws, and simple common sense, so committed to having Frank Spinelli on his payroll? Surely there are other qualified certified accountants in this town, state and nation who don’t bring with them all this baggage?

If nothing else, this should give you insight into how Dr. Wardynski operates. When he doesn’t get what he wants the first time, he keeps pushing, cajoling, and manipulating until things go his way.

Common sense be damned. Education be damned. Teachers be damned. Students and parents be damned. Whole neighborhoods be damned. Ethics and the Alabama State Code be damned.

He reminds me of a two year old who didn’t get the cookie that his mommy took away from him: he cries, screams, kicks, and finally climbs up the cabinet knocking the cookie jar over, ruining the cookies for everyone just because he didn’t get his way.

I really wish we were dealing with a rational adult in the position of superintendent. Heck, I’d even settle for a teenager.

Welcome back, Mr. Spinelli. It hardly seems you were gone.

The post Frank Spinelli Returns to HCS via LEANFrog appeared first on Geek Palaver.

In August 2011, Dr. Wardynski was on the campaign trail pushing for the renewal of the 6.5 mil property tax. During this push, he met with many various groups across the city, and in particular with groups associated with Grissom High School. In particular, he met with the South Huntsville Civic Association, and assured them that Grissom would be rebuilt on its current site.

He’s always been quick to make promises when he believes it will work to his advantage.

Beginning in October, however, rumors began to surface that Grissom might actually be moved, but of course, these rumors were “unfounded.”

Unfounded rumors seem to always have a way of turning out to be true in this district, don’t they?

On September 28, 2012, the consultant firm hired to do the work of the district in planning for the new Grissom, TCU Consultant Services, sent a letter to potential architect firms concerning the building of the new Grissom High. Yes, we are contracting our contracting now, but don’t distract me.

This letter laid out for the bidders a few general specifications concerning the new building which looked something like this:

New Grissom High School Design for an enrollment, when fully developed, of 2200-2400 students. Initial design for approximately 330,000 sq ft with a construction budget of approximately $48,000,000.00.

Now, you’ll note that there is no discussion of a location in this description from September 28th, but there are a few points that raise several questions about where the new school might be located. When meeting with the public for the first time on January 14th, Dr. Wilson and Dr. Wardynski shared with the public a brief description of the two locations under consideration. According to Dr. Wilson there would be a dramatic difference in the size of the two schools depending on which location was chosen. If the new Grissom were rebuilt on its current site, that building would hold approximately 1,800 students.

If instead the new Grissom were relocated to the “Weatherly Road” site (behind Sam’s Club), this would result in a building with a capacity for 2,200.

Furthermore if the new Grissom were built on the current site, the square footage of the new Grissom would be comparable to the current Grissom of about 280,000. If the new Grissom were instead relocated to the “Weatherly Road” site, it would (wait for it) have a square footage of 330,000.

Approximately one month after Dr. Wardynski assured the South Huntsville Civic Association that he had a specific plan for rebuilding Grissom on its current site, the architects were being asked to bid on a completely different plan.

But wait, there’s more.

If you look further into the letters sent from TCU Consultant Services to the potential architect firms you’ll find a letter dated October 23, 2012 that contains a slightly more detailed project description that reads:

New Grissom High School — will be approximately an 2200-2400 student new school, built on a newly selected site to be determined. The project size is approximately 330,000 sqft and has an approximate construction budget of $48,000,000.00.

So you see, at least as early as September 28th (and likely earlier) and definitely as early as October 23rd, the district was seeking architectural bids for a new Grissom that could not fit on the current Grissom location.

This is how Dr. Wardynski operates. He freely tells “concerned citizens” what he believes that they want to hear, then proceeds to follow a different plan behind closed doors. And while doing so, he happily sends his cheerleaders, like say Dr. Jennie Robinson, to speak to the press (as she did on November 26, 2012 or two months after the request for bids was sent to the architects) to say the following:

School board member Jennie Robinson, whose district includes Grissom, said there should be concerns when the district is contemplating a $60 million investment like a new high school. Like Brown, Robinson said the biggest concern she’s heard is what will become of the old Grissom campus.

“What do you put there that builds value to the neighborhood?” Robinson said. “You don’t hurt a neighborhood in the process of trying to build a school in a different place.”

She said relocating the school is still just a possibility and that no specific site is outweighing the others.

“All of the sites have considerations,” Robinson said. “Some have more challenges than others. Some have more advantages than others.

“In the end, it comes down to which one makes the most sense,” she said.

No, Dr. Robinson, in the end, it comes down to which location Dr. Wardynski actually wants to use, not which one makes the most sense. Despite her willingness to voice concern on behalf of the existing neighborhoods, she knew, or as a board member should have known, when she said that “no specific site is outweighing the others” that one specific site, specifically the misleadingly named “Weatherly Road” site, was far better suited to meeting the specifications that the district had already published.

The decision to move Grissom High to a new location had been made at least as early as September 28, 2012.

When Dr. Wardynski was first hired by the district in July 2011, he posted a document on the website entitled, “Preliminary Draft 60 Day Entry Plan.” For obvious reasons, this document is no longer posted on the district’s site, but since I have a few hoarder-like tendencies, I just happen to have a copy of his entry plan, the second page of which shows the following:

If he truly wanted to be “Our Superintendent” rather than “The Superintendent,” wouldn’t it make it easier if he openly and clearly discussed his plans for our district with us rather than continually telling us that decisions haven’t been made when we know that they have?

Respectfully, Dr. Wardynski and Dr. Robinson, it isn’t that hard to earn the confidence of “All Members of the Huntsville Community.” All you really have to do is to be concerned about all of the community’s members rather than just the business members of the community.

The post New Grissom Broken Promises appeared first on Geek Palaver.

I’ve wondered for a long time exactly where Dr. Wardynski’s support was coming from. Now we have it from the horse’s mouth.

Not Teachers

You see, he hasn’t ever had the support of teachers, you know, the only group of Huntsville City School employees that actually care about students and education. To be frank, the overwhelming majority of teachers in this district know that Wardynski is killing our schools. Once the damage is finalized, and we continue to see a declining enrollment, declining test scores (on evaluations that Wardynski can’t manipulate like the ACT scores), and an increased exodus of superb, experienced, and highly qualified teachers who have dedicated their lives (not just 5 weeks and then two years on a whim) to the art of teaching children, it will be clear that we should have put a stop to this man’s drive to destroy public education long ago.

But then it will be too late.

Not Parents

He doesn’t have the support of many parents in the community any more either now that he’s subjugated student safety to his own political agenda.

While he tried to buy off parent by giving their children laptops, (to break, to collect dust as teachers returned to actually teaching children rather than playing computer games) but over time, most parents have seen this as the silicon snake oil that it is. Students are still easily distracted. Students are still having to carry huge backpacks. Student are still having to open textbooks (you know those things that don’t shatter when a 8-year-old stumbles, and that don’t take 10 minutes to get to today’s reading selection) to learn.

Other parents have had their eyes open to the reality that Wardynski doesn’t actually give a damn about their children for a long time. We’ve known how Wardynski actually felt about the needs of special education children long before he began raiding the special education funding to pay for all his pet projects.

As children are challenged less often to allow for ever increasing “testing,” more and more parents will realize that Wardynski isn’t looking out for them or their children.

Development for Business

So who exactly is he looking out for? He said it tonight in the meeting:

“Our indication is that it will lead to development,” Wardynski said. “In this area (on Bailey Cove Road), we don’t see growth, we see sustainment.”

That’s it. Development is the motivating factor in this decision.

And no, he ain’t talking about childhood development. He’s talking about business development and nothing else.

The only group of people in this town whom still seem happy with Wardynski as superintendent (aside from the Ann Roy Moore haters) is the business community. Yep, the Chamber of Commerce is thrilled with him.

Why?

No Financial Miracle Worker

Well, first they’ve bought into the myth that Wardynski has turned the finances of this district around.

This is not true. The finances of this district were turned around before the man was hired. Dr. Richardson, who despite being a bit of a despot actually does care about public education, deserves all the credit for the financial turn around in this district. He’s the one who made the cuts that resulted in the change.

Wardynski has expanded spend, especially spending on himself and his friends. He has not cut it (well excluding refusing to even consider reinstating the STEP raises that have been frozen for 19 months now and his continual game playing with the Special Education budget).

He deserves, in other words, zero percent of the credit for our financial turnaround. That “miracle” happened before he got here, and it happened because our teachers continue to fund it by working for less and less money without a raise.

He Listens and Obeys

The business community supports him because unlike parents, he takes their calls. He listens when they speak. And he does what they ask.

So when they said:

“Look Casey, we know you just spent $6 million dollars expanding Grissom, and we know that you said that you wouldn’t build another high school for decade when you were finishing the New Lee/New Century (or whatever its name is), but we’ve got all this land just going to waste behind Sam’s Club, and you know, we’d really like to build some expensive houses over there, so we need you to move Grissom to the other side of the parkway. To make it work, we’ll even tell Tommy (Battle) to build you a new road. Oh, and get this, we can call it the Weatherly Road site to confuse everyone.

And when they call, Wardynski listens. And takes their call.

Excuse me, but what the hell does real-estate development have to do with student achievement? How are students being served by having to drive to school rather than walk? (You can’t cross the parkway on foot you know.) How is education improved at one of the most celebrated and awarded schools in the state by this move that ignores the needs of students and parents?

About a year ago, I wrote that you should care about the abuse that this man has heaped upon Special Education students and families because one day soon, he will do it to your kids, too.

Guess what? That day has arrived.

Someday the Chamber of Commerce will realize what a mistake they’ve made in backing this man, too. Wardynski doesn’t care about education. He doesn’t care about teachers, parents or students. He doesn’t care about Huntsville. Wardynski cares about Wardynski. And as soon as he gets a better offer, he’ll leave to mess up yet another district in another state.

The sad thing is that the Chamber won’t realize it until after schools have closed, property values have plummeted, and the city of Madison is bursting at the seams with expatriates from Huntsville.

If you want to make a difference in this plan, the only hope that I see is in convincing the chamber of commerce that they need to look past what they see as an immediate benefit to the long-term health of our community. If we can’t, I truly fear for the future of the Rocket City.

The post Wardynski “It Will Lead To Development” appeared first on Geek Palaver.

I often find myself at a loss for words after the board of education does something incredibly stupid like extending Dr. Wardynski’s contract by two years after he has had exactly one evaluation. When last they met, they were still spreading the completely illogical notion that extending his contract–a contract that is binding not on Dr. Wardynski (he can quit at anytime for any reason, even without notice) but rather is binding on the district–shows that he is “committed to the district.”

I pointed out to the board just how illogical this “reasoning” was back in November, and I asked them for an explanation, some, any justification that actually makes sense.

Of course, as is their practice (if not their officially stated policy), they ignored my question entirely and voted to extend his contract by two more years.

So, once again, we see that the rules that apply to teachers, aides, and other district employees, just do not apply to Dr. Wardynski and his friends. Teachers are evaluated for a minimum of three years before they receive any form of security. Most aides never receive any form of security at all.

But for Wardynski our board created an individualized evaluation tool, evaluated him exactly one time, and extended his contract by 67%.

In what industry does this happen? It seems that the only one where it happens is in football.

And so when I am at a loss for words, I spend time thinking about the situation, evaluating it, attempting to make sense out of the senselessness that is the Huntsville Board of Education. Want an example? Right before he voted to extend the contract, Mr. Blair had the following to say:

Blair: “This is really more of a one way contract, right. So, then you talk about good faith and all that, so, even with the current contract, Dr. Wardynski could leave tomorrow. There is no penalty for him leaving tomorrow. There’s only a penalty if we fire him tomorrow. So then we would have some type of buy out. So I think that’s really the good will nature that you’re talking about that you’re willing to sign a contract for a longer term even though you could opt out of it along the way. But I think that’s really kind of the point because everybody’s saying well, this is to keep him here. That’s not really . . . you could go anytime you want.”

Wardynski: “It’s really about the folks I work with everyday, knowing that I’m going to be here. The community, business leaders, firms that are looking to come into this city do they . . . they’re looking for consistency in execution and consistency in direction.”

Blair: “I’ve thought long and hard about it. And I’m a football, I like football, and we see this often with a head coach and assistant coaches, and the assistant coaches have contracts in place, and they want to know that their system is going to be in place because otherwise if the head coach leaves then they don’t have stability. So, I’ve thought about it, I’ve thought long and hard about this whole thing.”

So, the reason for the contract extension isn’t to ensure that Wardynski will be around cause this is “really more of a one way contract.” The reason is instead to make all of Wardynski’s friends feel secure and stable.

So, on the same night when the board approved the resignation of eight more people and the immediate retirement of four people with three more leaving at the end of the school year, Blair wants us to know that he’s really not concerned about Wardynski. No, he’s concerned about those “assistant coaches” who work under Wardynski.

From September 4th through December 20th (assuming that Dr. Wardynski’s summary of the HR report was correct) 134 teachers, aids, and other district employees have either resigned, retired, or announced their intention to retire at the end of the year.

134.

Yeah, Mr. Blair, we get that you’re really concerned about all those “assistant coaches” out there who are so deeply worried about Dr. Wardynski leaving town.

We’re so glad that you’ve thought “long and hard about this whole thing.”

I wonder how many more of our “assistant coaches” are planning to offer their resignations and retirements because the board extended Wardynski’s contract?

The post Wardynski’s Contract “For The Assistant Coaches” appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Ms. McCaulley, Mr. Birney, Mr. Blair, Dr. Robinson, and Mr. Culbreath:

In extending Dr. Wardynski’s contract tonight, the five of you, unanimously, voted to support the following:

• Teachers (and everyone else) should be run off in droves.
• Special education should fund the recovery from the debt that four of you created.
• Special education should receive more staffing cuts than any other group during a time of reduction in force.
• Testing should be should be used to evaluate teachers rather than students.
• Passing a standardized test is the ultimate and only goal of education.
• The superintendent should not be required to communicate with the public.
• That 81 arrests in a mere 53 days is a “sign of high standards.”
• Education should be privatized even when it costs more, and reduces the influence that the public has over it.
• The superintendent should be allowed to offer plum jobs to his friends and that some “teachers” should be treated differently because he likes them.
• Anyone with five weeks of training and no experience can teach better than someone who costs less and has four years (at least) of training.
• Computers are better teachers than people, and that anyone who disagrees should be called names by the superintendent.
• Schools should be merged and closed for no reason other than that the superintendent thinks it a good idea.
• The superintendent should blame the victim when one child (or group of children) abuses another.

These are just some of the things that you voted to continue tonight. These are the things that you were applauding. These are the things that you were patting yourselves on the back for.

You should be ashamed.

Just one simple fact clearly illustrates just how far off track the five of you actually are.

Seven days after 26 people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary school you spent four minutes talking about the safety of our children. (And 90 seconds of that was spent with Dr. Robinson telling Dr. Wardynski just how amazing he is.)

By comparison, you spent 28 minutes talking about property management.

You should be ashamed.

Oh, and don’t worry about responding to me. I’ve learned that the board doesn’t actually “study any concerns” brought to it. Feel free to ignore any issue I’ve raised here. Four of you have been doing so for the past 18 months anyway.

I just wanted it to be clear that these are the things that you voted to support tonight.

I know it. You know it. The public knows it.

You should be ashamed.

Sincerely,

Russell Winn
Parent

The post Open Letter: BOE Extends Wardynski’s Contract to 2016 appeared first on Geek Palaver.

So tomorrow night the board of education, at the request of the superintendent, will be voting on extending Dr. Wardynski’s current three year contract for an additional three years. Yep, five days before Christmas, the board is voting on giving the Superintendent a great Christmas present simply because he wants to show the district and the city just how committed he is to staying in the district as our superintendent.

Nope, that reason doesn’t make any more sense today than it did a month ago, does it?

Two weeks ago, I stood and asked the board to please provide the community with some reasonable justification for extending the superintendent’s contract half way through the first one, but, of course, they offered no response.

Big surprise, right?

Well, since they’re silent on the question, I thought I would go ahead and offer you 13 reasons why Wardynski’s contract should be extended for 2013. Someone please let the Board of Education know that I’ve done their homework for them. I’m sure they will appreciate it.

So, here’s the list:

1. You think that teachers (and everyone else) should be run off in droves.
2. You agree that special education children should fund the district’s recovery.
3. You think it’s a great thing for special education to receive more staffing cuts than any other group.
4. You believe that testing should be used to evaluate teachers rather than students.
5. You think that passing a standardized test is the ultimate goal of education.
6. You think it’s a good thing for the superintendent to threaten to quit rather than communicate.
7. You think 81 arrests in a mere 53 days is a “sign of high standards.”
8. You think that all of education should be privatized because it costs more,  it allows us to have so much more influence over the education of our children (as we have now with The Pinnacle Schools.
9. You believe that the superintendent should be allowed to offer plum jobs to his friends and that some should be treated differently because he likes them.
10. You believe that anyone, even someone who costs more, with five weeks of training and no experience, can teach better than someone who costs less and has four years (at least) of training.
11. You think a computer is a better teacher than a person and that anyone who disagrees should be called names.
12. You think that schools should be merged and closed for no reason other than that the superintendent thinks it a good idea.
13. You believe that the victims should be blamed when someone abuses them.

There you go. Thirteen reasons why Dr. Wardynski should have three more years to ruin (just in case you were wondering, no, I didn’t mean to type “run” there) our schools. If his contract is extended, 2013 will be a very unlucky year indeed.

If you wish to let your board member know that you think they should vote no on extending his contract, you need to contact them via email or phone before the meeting begins at 5:30pm tomorrow night.

I know it’s Christmas. I know you’ve got a billion other things you’d rather do. But guess what? The superintendent and the board know that too. This is why they’re voting on this right before the Christmas break.

They’re counting on you being too busy to voice your opinion about this decision. (By the way, that’s also why they’re pushing so hard to make the decision to move Grissom from its present location right now as well.)

If you think the extension is a bad idea, please contact the board member at the information below.

• District 1: Laurie McCaulley: lamccaulley@gmail.com
• District 2: David Blair: david.blair.hcsboard@gmail.com
• District 3: Jennie Robinson: personalbest@knology.net (256) 527-1425 (W) (256) 882-0925 (H)
• District 4: Topper Birney: topperb@knology.net (256) 883-2982
• District 5: Mike Culbreath: mwculbreath@gmail.com

If you think it’s not worth the trouble, remember those thirteen reasons are things that you voted to continue in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

The post Thirteen Reasons To Extend Wardynski’s Contract Tomorrow Night appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Thankfully, Dr. Wardynski has just updated his memo concerning gifts to teachers from December 7, 2011 to make it clear that teachers may receive a $25 gift card for Christmas. The new memo is dated December 19, 2012 and you may download it for yourself here Gifts to Teachers Policy 2012.pdf. The relevant text reads:

Public officials, including school employees, are allowed to receive gifts (including gift cards) valuing $25 or less per occasion, but not to exceed $50 in a calendar year from a single provider. We welcome any support of our teachers in their continuing dedicated efforts as long as they conform with the parameters outlined above.

So it seems that the Scrooge analogy was apt: right down to the change of heart at the end.

While I am grateful that this matter has finally been cleared up, it is important to remember that the legislature actually passed this new Act Number 2012-0433 in August of this year. I know that the central office has received calls and questions about this for at least the previous three weeks from a multitude of sources including principals, PTAs, parents and teachers.

While I recognize that it’s been terrible week since Friday, many people have been raising these questions since the beginning of the month when the district was focused on celebrating Dr. Wardynski’s major award as “Tech & Learning Leader of Year.”

Thankfully, Dr. Wardynski did not allow his pride to interfere with doing the right thing for our teachers this year. For that, despite the delay, I say thank you and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

PS. Please remember that just because you can give a gift certificate to teachers (finally), that doesn’t mean that you must give a gift certificate to teachers. I know hundreds, perhaps thousands, of teachers, and I have never known a single teacher who expected a gift certificate during the holidays. I assure you, every teacher I know would be ecstatic to receive a simple Thank You from students and parents.

Considering everything that’s happened this season, our teachers need and deserve our thanks.

The post HCS Updates Gifts To Teachers Policy: Gift Cards Allowed appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Remember last year when the Alabama State Legislature decided that giving a gift to a teacher was just the worst possible thing that any one could ever do?

Suddenly giving a teacher a small Christmas gift was on par with lobbyists attempting to purchase influence with our legislature. It was suddenly a Class B Felony for teachers to accept a gift that could possibly be resold from a five-year old. Any gift must have a “de minimis” value.

It was, just one more way for legislators to abuse our teachers.

De Minimis Undefined

And of course the legislature refused to define what “de minimis” might mean. The Ethics Commission stepped in and told us that de minimis meant that the gift could have no value at resell. So gift cards were out.

In response, Dr. Wardynski release a memo on December 7, 2011 that stated clearly that “gift cards with a specific monetary value are NOT permissible.”

So the district followed along, having no choice, and complaining about it loudly. Finally our board and superintendent had some bad news that they could blame on someone else.

The board and superintendent encouraged everyone to contact their representative and let them know that this law over reached and should be changed.

Guess what? The district (and it seems all the others across the state) listened, and did just that.

Legislature Response With A Clear Definition

In August 2012, the legislature passed an amendment (Act No. 2012-433) to the Ethics and Campaign Finance Law that finally offered a definition of de minims:

(11) DE MINIMIS: A value twenty-five dollars ($25) or less per occasion and an aggregate of fifty dollars ($50) or less in a calendar year from any single provider, or such other amounts as may be prescribed by the Ethics Commission from time to time by rule pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act or adjusted each four years from the date of the enactment of this amendatory act to reflect any increase in the cost of living as indicated by the United States Department of Labor Consumer Price Index or any succeeding equivalent index.

So it is finally crystal clear from the legislature what the meaning of “de minims” is: a single gift of $25 or less and a total of $50 or less in a calendar year. AL.com reported on this story back on December 5th.

It would seem that the legislature finally realized that giving a teacher a small gift card of $25 or less would not result in pandemonium.

Wardynski and the Board Ignore State Law: Bah Humbug

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Christmas Tree.

Suddenly our district leadership decided that the memo they released eight months before the passage of this Act took precedence over the legislature.

When the holiday season rolled around again this year, the district begin redistributing the superintendent’s memo from last year proclaiming that “gift cards with a specific monetary value are NOT permissible.”

Calls to the central office from parents, PTA members, and principals (in response to parental questions) have received verification that the memo stands.

Appeals to the board members have not been responded to (big surprise).

And so despite their complaints about the actions of the legislature a year ago, despite their encouragement of the public to have the law changed, despite the fact that the law was changed, Dr. Wardynski has not updated his memo from a year earlier.

Perhaps he prefers it this way? Perhaps taking away one of the few ways that a family can say thank you to a teacher serves his purposes of running off ever more teachers during his tenure as superintendent.

Or maybe he’s just being lazy. (I wouldn’t want to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist or anything.)

Either way, this year it is his turn to play the role of Scrooge in our ongoing game of abuse the teacher. He, along with the full support of the board of education, are the ones telling teachers that they cannot be trusted if they receive a small gift from a child wishing to say thanks this holiday.

Dr. Wardynski and the Huntsville City Schools Board of Education are the ones to blame for this abusive policy. And we need to hold them accountable.

Voting To Extend Wardynski’s Abuse of Teachers

The last board meeting of the year will be held Thursday, December 20th, at 5:30pm. The issue of gifts to teachers is not currently on the agenda, but guess what is?

Yep, the board will be voting on extending Dr. Wardynski three-year contract (which is half up) for another three years. They’ve offered no reasonable justification for this even being voted on at this time, but they will be voting on it anyway. If you, like I, think this is a bad idea given the fact that our district cannot afford to lose yet another 984 teachers over the next four and a half years (we’ve lost 246 in the first 18 months of Wardynski’s administration), then call or write your board member before Thursday night and ask them to vote against this ridiculous request for a 6 year contract from Dr. Wardynski.

Our schools will not survive if you don’t.

The post Huntsville City Schools to Teachers: Bah Humbug, Again appeared first on Geek Palaver.

This isn’t a political post.

While I was waiting outside to pick up my kids after school today, I was . . . overcome with a range of emotions that I haven’t really felt since my babies were born. The only day like it for me was perhaps the day that our pediatrician suggested that we have the boy tested for autism.

I was ecstatic that my children were safe. I was enraged that there are dads and moms in this nation who will never know that feeling again.

What happened today in Newtown, Connecticut should not happen. No one should have to face that.

But it does, and we do.

And when it does, we come . . . unmoored: a ship, tossed on the tempest, floundering and alone.

I cannot begin to know the grief, the pain, and the loss that Sandy Hook Elementary is facing. For that, I am forever grateful.

So what can I do? What do I know?

I can love my kids. And boy did they ever know it when I picked them up today.

I can thank, support, appreciate, and fight for all the staff, administrators, aides, volunteers, and teachers who willingly give their lives for the education and safety of my babies every day.

I am certain that over the next few weeks we will hear of the heroes who risked their lives for the children of others today.

I will remember that this isn’t new or unique to tragedies like Newtown or Columbine. Our teachers do this for our kids everyday. And that’s why we don’t see it clearly all the time.

I can do something nice for another human being, just because we breathe the same air.

I can work to change the attitude and approach toward mental illness in this nation. I don’t have any idea what the cause of this tragedy is at this time, but I do know that at some point in our lives, all of us need help. It is inexcusable that the prevailing attitude toward mental illness is, “if you were stronger,” or “if you were a better parent,” you or your child would be fine.

This must change.

Finally, I will suffer with those who are suffering; I’ll laugh with those who are happy; I’ll mourn with those who are mourning, and I’ll play with those who are playing.

I’ll say thank you.

And I’ll hold my kids close for those who cannot hold their own tonight.

I am heartbroken for our neighbors tonight. But I refuse to let them suffer alone.

We are one tonight. We are Sandy Hook.

As Mr. Rogers taught us: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

I will be a helper.

The post Look For The Helpers appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Yes, I’m still alive.

No, I haven’t been bought off by Huntsville City Schools

Sorry for the long layoff, y’all. As Sting wrote once, “Everybody’s got to leave the darkness sometime.” Huntsville City Schools and the mess that our board and the superintendent have gotten us into is quite dark.

As Dr. Wardynski rather matter-of-factly stated last Tuesday, 246 teachers have retired or resigned since he arrived in July of 2011.

246.

Some context for those numbers: In 2012 we had 1,303.44 Teachers Foundation Program Units, and in 2013 that has been reduced to 1,289.34 for an average of 1,296.39.

In other words in a year and a half we’ve had just shy of 20% of our teachers either retire or resign.

I’m so happy I can’t stop crying, indeed.

According to Dr. Wardynski’s summary (which are notoriously inaccurate when the final report is actually made available) of the HR report from last Tuesday 3 more teachers have retired and 2 more have resigned.

And The Board Played On

And the board plays on, never asking why our teachers are leaving, pushing such urgent business as celebrating Dr. Wardynski MAJOR AWARD from Tech & Learning Magazine (yeah, I’ve never heard of them either) as a 2012 “Tech & Learning Leader of the Year.” (By the way, if you want to know more about who decides who wins the “Tech & Learning Leaders of the Year” all you need to do is look at the Partner Sites Link on their site. You’ll see a link to Digital Learning Environments sponsored by, drumroll please, HP. You know, the same company that we just signed a three-year, $10,624,000.00 contract with. It’s AMAZING how important you become when you sign contracts of that size, isn’t it?)

It seems that Tech & Learning Magazine received a press release from the district’s PR department citing, incorrectly, again the Superintendent’s claims that, “Teacher reports and school records show students more engaged and interested in learning, and suspensions are down 56% from last year.”

This is, of course, not an entirely accurate statement as we’ve discussed.

But that MAJOR AWARD is far more important than the 246 teachers our district has lost in the past year and a half. (Those don’t include the RIF or those teachers whose contracts are non-renewed at the end of the year, either. If you factor in those numbers that number easily doubles.)

246 since July 2011.

Non-Stop Testing is Bad Educational Policy

This goes a long way toward explaining the District’s “Continuous Improvement Framework” during which Dr. Cooper, the deputy superintendent and Debbie Miser called for the district to move away from a focus on “teaching,” and on to a focus on “student learning.”

Teaching is no longer important in education in Huntsville City Schools.

The focus instead is now on student learning with an emphasis on, you guessed it, testing. Ms. Miser said that the only way to implement the Continuous Improvement Framework is to have “testing several times during the class period.”

That’s right. Testing on yearly, or quarterly basis isn’t cutting it. Testing on a weekly basis isn’t working either.

Hell, testing on a daily basis, just isn’t enough.

Now we need testing “several times during the class period.”

In other words, if less frequent testing isn’t producing the results we want, clearly the answer then is to test constantly.

I guess Finland didn’t get that message.

Finland Ignores American “Experts” And Succeeds

In case you didn’t know, America isn’t doing so well when compared with other nations around the world. Finland, in particular, has been doing astonishingly well since 2000 on the Program for International Student Assessment. They’ve managed to move to the top of most international rankings by, you’ll never guess, doing the exact opposite of what America has done since 2000.

Where we have increased testing, they have decreased it.

Whereas the past 12 years have shown that the American method of No Child Left Behind does precisely that, Finland’s method has steadily moved it to the envy of the world.

Yet, our approach here in Huntsville, driven by people who have no educational background whatsoever, is to do the exact opposite of what is working well in other nations.

And now we’re institutionalizing this bad policy so that even if Dr. Wardynski should land one of those jobs he claims he’s not interviewing for, we’re going to be stuck with inexperienced teachers implementing bad policy of constant, insistent testing.

Because education isn’t about exposing young minds to new ideas, new technologies, new frontiers in Huntsville anymore.

It’s about testing every minute of every day.

And for that, teachers just aren’t necessary.

246 is just the beginning.

The post Institutionalizing Bad Educational Policy appeared first on Geek Palaver.

Last night the board announced that they’ve been holding discussions with the superintendent about extending his contract which is due to expire on June 20, 2014, to June 30, 2017. He has requested to receive a three-year extension to his contract, an increase in his car allowance of $200 per month (from $600 to $800), and in return he is willing to give up his incentive bonus of up to $10,000 per year. Last year his incentive bonus was $9,920.

Contract Extension to Quell Rumors

Wardynski claims that he needs to receive this contract extension to put to rest “rumors about the superintendent interviewing for jobs in other districts.”

I often hear rumors about things occurring in the district. I heard about Spinelli’s resignation about 4 months before it occurred. I heard rumors about his harassment complaints before the superintendent discussed them at a board meeting in February.

I’ve heard rumors about Dr. Wardynski as well.

I don’t publish rumors. However, last night Mrs. McCaulley and Dr. Wardynski acknowledged the existence of rumors of his interviewing with other districts. So, one collection of rumors I had heard was that he was traveling for interviews in New York, Florida, and Maryland.

Illogical Reasoning . . . As Usual

Let’s look at the logic here:

• There have been rumors about Dr. Wardynski traveling for interviews in other districts in at least three separate states. Mrs. McCaulley and Dr. Wardynski confirmed the existence of the rumors last night. There was no discussion of whether or not the rumors were true or not.
• So instead of confirming or denying the rumors, Dr. Wardynski’s response was to request a three year contract extension from the board.
• He and the board concluded that such an extension would confirm his commitment to Huntsville.

There seems to be a problem here doesn’t there?

If Dr. Wardynski wishes to confirm his commitment to Huntsville, why is he asking for Huntsville to confirm our commitment to him?

Wouldn’t it make more sense, wouldn’t it be more logical for Dr. Wardynski to simply:

1. State that he isn’t interviewing with other districts?
2. State that he has interviewed with other districts, but that he has decided that Huntsville is far and away the best place for him?
3. Stop accepting interviews with other districts?
4. State that he isn’t interested in leaving?

Asking for a contract extension to prove your desire to stay is kinda like asking your wife for permission to cheat, so you can prove to her how committed you are to the marriage.

It just doesn’t work that way.

He wants us to tell him and the rest of the nation that we really  want him to stay. This will make a great bargaining tool when he’s negotiating and interviewing with other districts. Just as many companies will not hire someone who is unemployed, Wardynski looks better to other districts when his contract isn’t about to expire.

Extending his contract says absolutely nothing about his desire to stay here as the board claimed last night.

As Clause 13 of the contract states, the contract isn’t binding on him. It requests a three month notice, but if he doesn’t give one, all that will mean is that he won’t be paid the $43,749.99 for that time. In other words, all of the burden rests on the district. None rests on Wardynski. He can still interview with other districts. He can still accept another job. Giving him a three year extension doesn’t prove commitment to the district. The three year commitment proves the district’s commitment to him.

He can, despite the extension, leave at any time.

So if he actually wants to prove, as McCaulley claimed, that “he’s committed to Huntsville,” here are a few things he can do:

1. Say, “I am not interviewing with any other job.”
2. Refuse to accept the bonus he is receiving until teachers STEP raises are restored.
3. Refuse to discuss a contract extension.

If he’s really committed to Huntsville, he should be willing to work out his existing contract without requiring additional promises from the district. If anything, asking for an extension proves that he is not committed to our district.

There is no logical reason for the board of education to extend his contract at this point.

So, they will likely do just that.

If you believe that they should politely tell the superintendent where he can put his “suggestion” of a contract extension, please contact your board member and let them know what you think. You may reach them at the email/phone numbers below:

• District 1: Laurie McCaulley: lamccaulley@gmail.com
• District 2: David Blair: david.blair.hcsboard@gmail.com
• District 3: Jennie Robinson: personalbest@knology.net (256) 527-1425 (W) (256) 882-0925 (H)
• District 4: Topper Birney: topperb@knology.net (256) 883-2982
• District 5: Mike Culbreath: mwculbreath@gmail.com

Please contact them immediately and let them know what you think of their logic. It’s possible, just possible, that they might actually listen.

The post Wardynski Requests a Three Year Contract Extension appeared first on Geek Palaver.