Last week I had the opportunity to give the Social Justice Keynote for The California Association of Latino Superintendents and Administrators (CALSA) at the University of San Diego for their Sixth Annual Research to Practice Academic Conclave on May 8, 2015. CALSA is:
A community of diverse educational leaders skilled in addressing the needs of Latino/a students and dedicated to increasing the number of highly effective Latino/a administrators.
Here is the transcription of the lecture focusing on high-stakes testing and local accountability:
I have the unenviable position of being your after lunch speaker.
Looks like that gentleman in the back is already ready for his afternoon nap.
First, I want to thank each and everyone one of you for dedicating your life to our state’s children.
Second I’d like to invite you to tweet quotes and photos at me during this talk to @ProfessorJVH.
Third, this new lecture represents the advancement, evolution, and application of my thinking about high-stakes testing.
I’d like to begin thousands of miles on the other side of the planet. That place where we were always trying to dig to as a young child— China.
Julian Vasquez Heilig at Great Wall of China in 1996
I have visited China three times, once in each of the past three decades.
What really struck me during the time that I lived in China— and my subsequent visits— was the severe integration of high-stakes testing into Chinese society to sort and stratify.
I recently authored a policy brief with DongMei Li, a Chinese graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin (See After Thousand of Years, #China Changing Mind on #Testing ? #edreform). We wrote that Chinese society has been driven by testing for thousands of years, dating back to ancient times when civil servants and leaders were selected based solely on the imperial service examinations given in the Forbidden City and elsewhere.
While this old exam system was terminated after more than a thousand years in 1906, the high-stakes testing culture persisted— and has played a critical role in selecting “talent” in Chinese society.
Currently, the public school environment in China is testing-oriented because the sole mechanism enabling college access for the vast majority of high school students is the national higher education entrance examination.
Also, for many years, entrance into high schools was determined by high school entrance exams. If you scored well, you would attend an academic or vocation school— score poorly and your journey ended with only an 8th grade education.
Thus, high-stakes testing is not a new educational reform. China has used tests to sort their society for more than 1500 years!!
Closer to home, for about 100 years, high-stakes tests have been used to sort and track students in the United States.
High-stakes tests were created to sort, they were not created for civil rights and social justice purposes.
However, now that the federal government is requiring and monitoring high-stakes testing, they have been retread as civil rights and social justice.
Civil rights groups realized the disparate impact on students of color as high-stakes tests began to rise in prominence in education policy in the 1980s.
In the Florida case Debra P v. Turlington, it was argued and acknowledged by civil rights groups at the time that the tests had a disparate impact on students of color.
Despite the fact that the high-stakes exit test had a clear disparate impact on students of color and the severe inequality and underfunding of schools in the Sunshine State.
In Debra P, the federal court’s decision paved the way for the high-stakes testing era to flourish and be later codified as national policy in No Child Left Behind.
We should ask ourselves the meta question:
Has the high-stakes testing and accountability regime imported from Texas for NCLB even worked?
Honestly, I began my career as a testing and accountability cheerleader. But my mind was changed once I experienced it up close in the late 1990s working in the Research and Accountability office of the Houston Independent School District.
In fact, the Texas Miracle was the primary evidence that No Child Left Behind’s testing and accountability regime would work— at least according to George W. Bush and former Secretary of Education Rod Paige.
For today’s moment of Zen, check out John Oliver’s recent piece on standardized testing from his show Last Week Tonight.
I wanted to show a few clips here today, but it has too much non-academic language…
Well… honestly he just used lots of NSFW innuendo to describe Obama and Duncan’s approach to testing, standards and accountability.
So I’ll give you my G-rated version instead.
At the reception later I can give you my PG-13 thoughts.
After nearly ten years of Texas-inspired high-stakes testing and accountability, President Barack Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan went with more of the same in Race to the Top.
Arguably their top priority, Common Core and the tests they were designed for and by the testing companies have become the primary agenda in California and elsewhere.
So, has Bush and Obama’s high-stakes testing and accountability policy worked?
As shown in the John Oliver show, recent research from Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford demonstrated that No Child Left Behind has actually slowed our nation’s progress towards the closing of the achievement gaps. They calculated that at the new slower pace experienced under NCLB, it will take 80 more years to close the achievement gap.
It is important to recognize why some argue and have lobbied in DC to keep testing in schools in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind— soon to be known as “Every Child Ready for College or Career Act of 2015.”
Although, I think they should have gone with this moniker for the law instead:
“A New Name, but more of the Same Act of 2015”
The belief expressed in the conversation in DC is that a light of social justice won’t be shone on the inequities in schools for ELLs and others if high-stakes tests are neutered in federal law.
Thus, the conversation about how to measure and address injustices in our system has been dominated in the reauthorization conversation by:
we need high-stakes tests, or
we need more tests, or
we need a greater or lesser frequency of tests, or
I am vexed by the fact that we readily acknowledge the problems with tests for ELLs and others, but in the same breath many say they want to keep this problematic regime.
History is clear.
High-stakes tests are an ancient sorting mechanism and they have not improved the education system in the United States. In fact, our growth has slowed overall.
Thus, our educational policy leaders and stakeholders must consider new approaches.
We should support a multiple measures qualitative and quantitative community-based dashboard approaches to evaluate the success of states, districts, schools, teachers and students without the primary or majority focus being a high-stakes standardized exam.
In sum, we should take advantage of the abundance of data we already have in federal and state data. And consider collecting new data that we feel is more specific and or valuable than the state assessments have been for educators.
For our public conversations about education, we need multiple measures dashboards to understand the successes and failures of our schools.
Local Accountability has the potential to be a “Coign of Vantage” for ELLs and other historically underserved students in California and the nation.
In a recent paper with Sonya Horsford that was published in the Journal of Urban Education, we discussed that the failure of top-down school reform to improve long-term outcomes in urban communities has prompted educators, students, parents, and citizens alike to question the ways in which we hold public schools accountable for student learning and performance.
Education research— representing a wide range of disciplinary perspectives including: history, sociology, political science, and public policy and interdisciplinary fields, such as leadership studies and program evaluation— has contributed greatly to our understanding of the role of schools, neighborhoods, and communities in urban education reform.
Although research and policy discourses analyzing and comparing the effectiveness and drawbacks of reform— whether top-down or grassroots— are far from new, our knowledge base concerning how such efforts should take place, by whom, and the degree to which they are sustainable— is growing.
We must press for community-based reforms in the public discourse instead of top-down, privately controlled reforms.
We can utilize community-based, democratic approaches to student and teacher assessment.
We must also support stakeholder collaboratives such as community-based charters instead of corporate based charters.
We must do this because democratic control of public schools drives the health of our democracy!
So my challenge to you today is to think about how we grow and access the capacity of local stakeholders including students, teachers, administrators, parents, educators, the faith community, business leaders and others to engage in a spectrum of reforms that are currently being pushed toward private control.
Of, course this work isn’t easy, as some recent evaluations of local accountability plans and processes have suggested. It’s a paradigm shift away from a decade of top-down reform.
But, we must act to change the public conversation about the successes and failures of our schools.
This approach is not anti-education “reform” but instead presents an alternative to top-down, privately controlled policy.
In conclusion, community-based reform and policy changes the conversation from educators and local stakeholders as the “problem” by instead re-empowering them as the solution and strengthening the thread that links communities to vibrant, participatory neighborhood public schools.
Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button in the upper left hand corner of this page.
Congratulations and condolences to Arne Duncan for winning the 2014 Educational Policy Turkey of the Year Award! Will he come by to accept the award? 🙂
The blog Cloaking Inequity seeks to illuminate popular and dominant ideologies that purport to foment equality and close the achievement gap. Often well-intentioned citizens support educational policy that claim to create a more inclusive and better quality education system— unbeknownst (or beknownst) to them— these policies magnify and hide inequality by utilizing an elegant, yet false, bureaucracy of data, research and media promotion.
This year, the 2014 Educational Policy Turkey of the Year Award was voted on by nearly 1,000 readers of Cloaking Inequity. The award is based on Cloaking Inequity posts from calendar year 2014. With 51% of the vote, the 2014 CloakingInequity.com Educational Policy Turkey of the Year award goes to Secretary Arne Duncan. For all posts that mention Arne Duncan click here.
Bird is the word. Congratulations Secretary! Also check out the Moms Against Arne Duncan (MAD) Facebook group here.
Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.
Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button in the upper left hand corner of this page.
Interested in joining us in the sunny capitol of California and obtaining your Doctorate in Educational Leadership from California State University Sacramento? Apply by March 1. Go here.
Please vote!! Cloaking Inequity seeks to illuminate popular and dominant ideologies that purport to foment equality and close the achievement gap. Often well-intentioned citizens support educational policy that claim to create a more inclusive and better quality education system— unbeknownst (or beknownst) to them— these policies magnify and hide inequality by utilizing an elegant, yet false, bureaucracy of data, research and media promotion. For the past two years, Cloaking Inequity has held a contest for the Educational Policy Turkey of the Year Award. The past winner were discussed in the posts Teach For America: 2012 Educational Policy Turkey of the Year and Vote for 2013 Educational Policy Turkey of the Year Award
This year, the 2014 Educational Policy Turkey of the Year Award will again be voted on by the viewers of Cloaking Inequity and announced after Thanksgiving Day (Gobble Gobble). The award is based on Cloaking Inequity posts from calendar year 2014. This award will be given to the educational policy (or program) of the year that is deemed to most egregiously cloak inequity. I will provide hyperlinks about each nominee for research purposes. Let the voting begin!
Please vote below. No ballot box stuffing please. 🙂
Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.
Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button in the upper left hand corner of this page.
Please blame the future “2014 Educational Policy Turkey of the Year” Award winner for any typos.
Interested in joining us in the sunny capitol of California and obtaining your Doctorate in Educational Leadership from California State University Sacramento? Apply by March 1. Go here.
Has your state experienced a meteoric rise in its graduation rate since Arne Duncan’s new graduation standards went into effect? Do you think it too good to be true? Nobody likes to be lied to. The latest Arne Duncan sleight of hand is the reporting and trumpeting of graduation rates. The Washington Post related:
Calling it “a profound milestone,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday that the country has reached its highest graduation rate in history, with 80 percent of students receiving a diploma in 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available.
Texas is one of the exceptional performers; the state boasts a graduation rate in the upper 80s.
The fact that Texas is in that list is remarkable, given some of the unique challenges it faces in educating young people. More than half of the state’s students receive free or reduced-cost lunches, and there is a sizeable population of non-native English speakers.
What does TEA say about the amazing success of the Lone Star State?
“You can’t address the problem until you define it,” she said. “You’ve got to know that John Smith is the kid at risk of dropping out, not just look at percentages.”
or REDEFINE your “data”… what do I mean by that? The Fusion.net piece concluded the article with the following:
Skewed numbers
But Rodriguez and several other people with knowledge of the state’s education system said that some of the uptick in graduation rates may actually come from the way Texas reports numbers to the government. In other words, the improvement might not really be as great as the state says it is.
Julian Vasquez Heilig, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been vocally critical of the state’s graduation measurements.
“What they’re doing that’s amazing when it comes to graduation rate is lying to the government,” he said.
There are a couple of ways for the state to calculate graduation rate. One, called the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACGR), lets states make adjustments for students who leave, through transferring out of state, homeschooling, passing away and some other scenarios.
The measurement is intended to let states get a more accurate count of where their students end up, but it also gives the state control over which “leaver” code they use and, depending on the code, they can let themselves off the hook for any follow up. If the state enters the homeschool code, for instance, the kid might actually not continue their education and really be a dropout, but they aren’t flagged as a dropout by the state.
“It allows Texas to tell the feds what the denominator is,” Vasquez Heilig said. “People are really good at hiding dropouts.”
The other measurement to determine the graduation rate is something called the Adjusted Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), which doesn’t let the state alter the denominator. In most states, the two measurements are relatively similar. In Texas, there’s enough of a discrepancy to elicit concern.
A 2013 report on graduation rates noted, “Both graduation rate measures (AFGR and ACGR) broadly agree on the rate and level of progress achieved by hispanic students. There is, however, a consistent five-to-six percentage point difference in overall graduation rates produced by the two different metrics and a ten-point divergence on the graduation rate for African Americans, which gives pause.”
“There are some data questions,” said Robert Balfanz, co-director of Johns Hopkins University’s Everyone Graduates Center, which helped author the reports. “They allow themselves some exceptions not everyone else allows themselves.”
He cited homeschooling and said the state also has thriving private, charter and online schools. The state “can get kids off their books” if they can show they’ve transferred to another degree-granting institution, he said, and then they no longer bear responsibility, even if the student drops out the next week.
Last year Cloaking Inequity looked at Texas’ meteroic rise in the graduation rates in Texas in the post Texas Lies to Feds: Enrontize Federal Graduation Data. I will reblog the post here to demonstrate how Texas has gone from 29th in the nation to 4th in the nation in the last three years.
At the end of 2012, with much fanfare Texas trumpeted that its 86% Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACGR) was 4th in the nation. (For more on the ACGR go here). This would be a miraculous achievement for the Lone Star State. As we show in Is Texas leading its peers and the nation?: A Decadal Analysis of Educational Data, Texas’ Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) was 75.4% as recently as three years ago and ranked 29th in the nation. [i]
Many Texans have expressed that the 86% graduation rate is contrary to what they are seeing in Texas high schools and have characterized the results as “dubious.” The Houston Chronicle reported on recent independent analysis of the graduation rate in Texas,
Bill Hammond, president and CEO of the Texas Association of Business, calculated a completion rate of 65 percent by comparing ninth grade enrollment with the number of seniors graduating from the same cohort. Children at Risk takes the process a step further, tracking student movement through “leavers” – students not counted by the Texas Education Agency as dropouts but who leave the school for reasons beyond transferring to another public school. At 71.6 percent, Children at Risk’s calculated graduation rate strives to account for students who fall through the cracks. The data in both figures show the fact of the matter: The dropout problem remains prevalent.
So how has Texas shown miraculous ACGR graduation rate and increased it by 15-20% compared to independent analyses and the AFGR? Cloaking Inequity has been on the case since early December 2012 when I submitted a FOIA request to the Texas Education Agency (TEA). TEA recently responded. So here for your viewing pleasure, I have pasted data excerpts from TEA’s response below:
The numerator of the four-year ACGR for the class of 2011, i.e. the number of students in the class who graduated with a regular high school diploma in four years, is 274,562.
The denominator of the four-year ACGR for the class of 2011, i.e. the number of students in the class who graduated, continued in school in year 5, received a General Educational Development (GED) certificate, or dropped out, is 319,588.
The number of first-time Grade 9 students in 2007-08 was 356,183.
The number of students who transferred into the cohort (i.e. who entered Texas public schools in Grade 10 in 2008-09, Grade 11 in 2009-10, or Grade 12 in 2010-11) was 22,589.
The number of students who transferred out of the cohort (i.e. “other leavers”) was 53,538.
The first thing I noticed was that the first-time ninth graders plus transfers in and minus transfers out equals 325,234 and not 319,588. (The difference is accounted for by “data errors,” essentially TEA has excluded them from the denominator because they don’t know where they are or who)
Now lets focus on the 53,538 transfers out of the 2011 ACGR cohort denominator.
Other Leavers, by Leaver Reason, Texas Public Schools, Class of 2011 Grade 9 Cohort
Code
Leaver reason
Number
03
Died while enrolled in school or during the summer break after completing the prior school year
376
16
Withdrew from/left school to return to family’s home country
9,942
24
Withdrew from/left school to enter college and is working towards an Associate’s or Bachelor’s degree
487
60
Withdrew from/left school for home schooling
14,991
66
Removed by Child Protective Services (CPS) and the district has not been informed of the student’s current status or enrollment
151
78
Expelled under the provisions of the Texas Education Code (TEC) §37.007 and cannot return to school
263
81
Withdrew from/left school to enroll in a private school in Texas
7,116
82
Withdrew from/left school to enroll in a public or private school outside Texas
19,430
83
Was attending and was withdrawn by the district when the district discovered that the student was not entitled to enrollment in the district because (a) the student was not a resident of the district, (b) was not entitled under other provisions of TEC §25.001or as a transfer student, or (c) was not entitled to public school enrollment underTEC§38.001 or a corresponding rule of the Texas Department of State Health Services because the student was not immunized
510
85
Graduated outside Texas before entering Texas public school, entered a Texas public school, and left again
–a
86
Complete General Educational Development (GED) certificate outside Texas
68
87
Withdrew from/left school to enroll in the Texas Tech University ISD High School Diploma Program or the University of Texas at Austin High School Diploma Program
174
90
Graduated from another state under provisions of the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Children
–
Total
53,538
A dash (-) indicates data are not reported to protect student anonymity.
One of the interesting things about the homeschool PEIMS code is that it has tripled over the last decade. When students are coded as leaving school for homeschooling they are not consider dropouts nor are they included in the denominator of the ACGR. The Houston Chronicle ran a story in 2010 and said that “home-schooling in Texas doesn’t add up” and that Texas is “disguising thousands of middle and high school dropouts in this hands-off category.” Excluding students using in the homeschool PEIMS code would also inflate the ACGR.
Even the state’s biggest proponents of home-schooling admit that the structure is vulnerable to fraud.
“That seems to me to be a loophole,” said Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition.
The problem is not among legitimate home-schoolers, but among public school officials trying to run off problem students, Lambert said.
“We call it dumping,” he explained. Some advocates complain that Spanish-speaking and special-needs student are especially vulnerable to being pushed out of public schools.
In fact, until 2011-12, according to the Texas Education Data Standards (TEDS) rules, Texas districts could just state that students “intended” to be homeschooled. Now they are required to obtain a signed form from the parents.
Do you want to code 9,942 students as leaving the country? Here is what you need as official documentation, again from the TEDS:
Acceptable documentation is also a copy of the withdrawal form signed and dated by the parent/guardian or qualified student and a campus or district administrator.
Only the student and administrator signs..hmmmmm
Texas high schools could also state until 2011-12 that students “intended” to enroll in a public or private school out of state. This code was used for 19,430 out-of-state and 7,116 in-state. Now the state of Texas is requiring that school either get a transcript request, verification from recieving district or a signed letter from the parent. But in 2007-2008, well, this was not required. Sure, Texas has mobility, but it was not required to be verified.
So what is the bottom line here? The AFGR did not allow Texas to define away dropout and inflate their graduation rate because it averaged enrollments in the 8th, 9th and 10th grades for the denominator. The AFGR of course had its weaknesses, especially in states with high mobility. For example, in Is Texas leading its peers and the nation?: A Decadal Analysis of Educational Data, Texas’ AFGR for Asians was above 100% because of the influx of Asian American students into the state. However, the ACGR also has weaknesses because Texas has found creative ways to reduce the denominator by requiring very limited documentation from schools. These loopholes were apparently closed in 2011 as the state sought to meet federal reporting guidelines for its PEIMS codes.
Myself, Linda McNeil, Angela Valenzuela, Linda Darling-Hammond, Gary Orfield, Walt Haney, IDRA and many others have highlighted over the years how Texas data is exceedingly spurious. The ACGR is just the latest egregious example. So I guess that means that we have to wait until the class 2015 to get a valid picture of Texas’ graduation rates.
In conclusion, I will leave you with a few quotes from Texas high school administrators included in my EEPA article.
Testing Coordinator:
I think each year we get a new set of regs, and we try and figure out how is the best way to use it to our advantage… I mean, the game changes…it’s…like any – like a game that has a set of instructions. And everybody gets the same set of instructions, and everybody follows the same set of instructions… If you’re really savvy, and if you’re really into everything as a principal you may see a problem… you may give your campus an advantage that another campus doesn’t have.
Assistant Principal:
It’s human nature to…look at your game plan and to look at the rules of the game… You know, and to say that using a loophole is not right or is a bad thing to do, I don’t necessarily agree with, because it could be a good thing. It depends on the loophole… schools, yes, are under pressure to look for creative ways to be successful, okay, that’s obvious.
TEA’s comment on the critique levied in the Fusion.net piece?
Ratcliffe, the state spokeswoman, said the state does have “a high mobility rate,” but that “we think our count is very accurate…We believe our districts are reporting the information to us accurately.”
Except for when TEA actually investigates and audits the leaver reporting. Just ask El Paso, Yselta, Houston etc etc.
Has your state experienced a meteoric rise in its graduation rate since the ACGR went into effect? Do you think it too good to be true? You can request the leaver data from your state and/or locality and sleuth your graduation rate. Please let Cloaking Inequity know the results of your citizen research.
For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on Arne Duncan click here.
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Want to know about Cloaking Inequity’s freshly pressed conversations about educational policy? Click the “Follow blog by email” button in the upper left hand corner of this page.
Interested in a Masters in Educational Policy and Planning from UT-Austin? It’s not too late to apply. Go here.
[i] The AFGR high school is an estimate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education of the percentage of high school students who graduate on time. The AFGR uses aggregate student enrollment data from Common Core Data to estimate the size of an incoming freshman class and counts of the number of diplomas awarded four years later. The U.S. Department of Education creates the AFGR by estimating the incoming freshman class size by summing the enrollment in 8th grade in 1 year, 9th grade for the next year, and 10th grade for the year after, and then dividing by three. The averaging is intended to account for prior year retentions in the 9th grade. The AFGR estimate of an on-time graduation rate can be computed with currently available cross-sectional data. Similar to the event dropout rate, the AFGR is not as accurate as an on-time graduation rate computed from a cohort of students using individual student record data.
So what happens when a President chooses a basketball buddy as Secretary of Education? Really, Obama… what did you expect when you chose a non-educator, non-expert to lead American education? A leader who left Chicago in shambles, whose school “turnarounds” didn’t work. Disappointed by his latest inanity at the Mom Congress, I have selected ten quotes from Arne Duncan’s reign as Secretary for a top ten.
It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” Duncan said. “You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut. Source
Really Arne? You are going to attack the independent/swing female voters the Democratic party needs in coming elections? Over Common Core? You realize that TAMSA kicked policymakers’ a___ in Texas for similar antiquated and disingenuous thinking about high-stakes testing?
The vast majority who drop out of high school drop out not because it’s too hard but because it’s too easy. Source
Talk to students Arne. They will tell you that high-stakes testing is discouraging. They will tell you that class after class of test-prep is dull. See all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on dropout here.
I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. Source
Reformers ideas in New Orleans have been a failure. It’s just that simple. For more information and research go here.
We’ve been able to do things – for example, close schools for academic failure. It is hugely difficult, it’s hugely controversial and it’s absolutely the right thing to do. That simply does not happen in other cities, because of a lack of political will. Source
Turnaround hasn’t worked in Chicago or Texas or elsewhere. Why? Read here.
Teach For America made teaching cool again in low-income communities for a whole generation of talented college graduates. Its record shows that poverty need not be destiny in the classroom. When it comes to teaching, talent matters tremendously. Source
As you all know, KIPP has selected Houston as ground zero for education reform. It’s here where you are trying to create a critical mass, a tipping point of high-performing schools that will transform the entire Houston public school system. Source
Parent trigger is an important tool… There are lots of things parents can do…parent triggers are a piece of that. Source
There are purposeful and monied interests behind the parent trigger movement that are not focused on parental empowerment but instead have ulterior motives. See Parent Trigger
Essentially, the Times took seven years of student test data and developed what is called a “value-added” analysis to show which third- through fifth-grade teachers are making the biggest gains…The results may be soon posted on the newspaper’s website in a searchable data base by teacher name — taking transparency to a whole new level… I am a strong advocate for transparency. This is one thing that NCLB got right. Source
Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day. Source
Arne Duncan’s quote should read “Arne Duncan is in denial and he is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving him wrong every day.”
We’ve seen more reform in the last year than we’ve seen in decades, and we haven’t spent a dime yet. It’s staggering how the Recovery Act is driving change. Source
President Obama, please learn a lesson from President Clinton. He selected the best and brightest for his administration and dealt with the drama and disloyalty at a later date. Because you are hiring only those that you trust, they have turned out to not be the best people for the job and unable to execute (see also healthcare rollout). If Hillary was our current two term president, would Arne Duncan be the Secretary of Education?
p.s. Please feel free to include any Duncan inanity that I missed in the comments.
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In the Florida case Debra P v. Turlington, it was argued and acknowledged by civil rights groups at the time that the tests had a disparate impact on students of color.
Has the high-stakes testing and accountability regime imported from Texas for NCLB even worked?
Thus, the conversation about how to measure and address injustices in our system has been dominated in the reauthorization conversation by:
Local Accountability in California is that new way. If you love or hate Local Accountability, it turns out I am partially to blame.
5. Arne Duncan. For being absolutely incompetent. Need I say more? See 
Cloaking Inequity 
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