The Takeover of Public Education in America: The Agenda to Control Information and Knowledge Through the Accountability System
178
The Takeover of Public Education in America: The Agenda to Control Information and Knowledge Through the Accountability System
178Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496968609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Pages: | 178 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.38(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Takeover of Public Education in America
The Agenda to Control Information and Knowledge Through the Accountability System
By A. Patrick Huff
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2015 A. Patrick Huff, Ph.D.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4969-6860-9
CHAPTER 1
The Current State of Public Education in America
Is the education system in America on the right track, or is it horribly flawed? That could be the fundamental question that needs answering. Our school officials at the state and federal level tell us we are on the right track. They tell us the achievement gap is narrowing and our children are receiving the education they need to compete in today's global market. In 2011 a funny thing happened, however, on the way to school reform. Schools all across America began to fail in record numbers. Washington called this a crisis in education. How apropos that the very entity that created the crisis was now decrying the crisis. Blue-ribbon panels were assembled to investigate this crisis of failure. An answer was needed to the ever-increasing number of schools that were not meeting standards. Washington's mantra was that if the standards were not met, something had to be done to rectify the situation. Experts from academia, corporations, independent businessmen and women, politics, and even the entertainment industry gathered in some of these made-for-TV investigative reports to deliver their magic pill that was going to take a kid from urban America and make him or her excited about attending school. What they should have said was, make him or her excited about wanting to take, and do well on, a standardized test. The experts talked about creating a spark in a child that would make learning fun. They talked about the joys of reading and the exhilaration of logically putting your thoughts down on paper. They discussed the disparity between urban minority children when compared to their suburban counterparts, called the achievement gap. Never once, however, did any expert who had numerous credentials by his or her name, mention the real reason why the schools were failing.
Schools fail because they fail to meet standards. This is how it is worded in the accountability system of the state and federal education agencies. Schools either meet standards or they fail to meet standards. These standards refer to the percentage of students passing in their like group on the standardized test given to students once a year. The like groups will be explained shortly, but suffice it to say that all students are placed into groups based on ethnicity, gender, language ability, or learning disability that qualify for special education services. It has nothing to do with the number of students who learn their course requirements and pass their classes. It has nothing to do with the dedication and hard work of the teachers, counselors, and administrators who are doing everything in their power to get their students to be successful. It has everything to do with the percentages of students who pass the test within their categorized group. The percentage required in the groups rises with each successive year. When the percentages become unreachable, the school fails.
Due to the manner in which the debate over school failure is framed, the public's viewpoint is that teachers aren't working hard enough or smart enough, and principals aren't showing proper leadership. This lack of effort and leadership is also the perception presented by the media and government officials. This perception of by the public, media and government officials, however, is not what fails a school. People from business who understand standards as a means of measuring productivity are in full agreement that schools should have standards. There needs to be criteria that define what a child needs to learn and when he or she needs to learn it. There is no argument with that point. This is what is termed a scope and sequence, and teachers have always followed a scope and sequence with their curricula. What the general public does not understand is that these curriculum-essential elements of learning are not the standards that determine if a school fails. It is the percentage of passing in the groups that are evaluated for accountability that determines pass or fail for the school and the school district. The groups where students are placed are called by different names in different school districts throughout the country. The groups are called either subgroups or sub-populations. For the sake of clarity I will use the term subgroups. Each subgroup stands alone when it comes to accountability and meeting the standards or failing to meet the standards.
In Texas, where I have spent my career, the accountability system of the Texas Education Agency divides a school's report card, for measuring the state test results, into subgroups. This occurred in 1991. At the same time, a more rigorous state test was developed. This latest evolution of the state standardized test was called TAAS, or Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Every state had a similar test that was governed through its state education agency. The students were divided into subgroups and were categorized into five groups: All Students, African American, Hispanic, White, and Economically Disadvantaged. At this time the federal government was not involved in the accountability system. School districts were doing reasonably well under this testing format. Lessons had not become scripted yet, and teachers were not teaching to the test. There was still a level of flexibility for teachers to inject their own expertise and experience into their lessons.
This changed in 2002 with the advent of No Child Left Behind under the George W. Bush administration. For the first time the federal government was now dictating to the states a measure of accountability that would forevermore bring the schools under federal jurisdiction. The mechanism of control brought in with No Child Left Behind was called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Along with this new mechanism of control, the U.S. Department of Education added two more subgroups. These subgroups were Special Education and Limited English Proficient (LEP).
Very important to understand is this basic point: the intent of subgroups was to force school officials to address groups of students that were not performing well on the standardized test. There was a gap in the passing percentage in some of the groups. Because this achievement gap, which still exists, had more to do with poverty than it did ethnicity, the very students that NCLB purports to help are the very students that are hurt the most. This will be discussed further in the text, but suffice it to say now that the reason for this is that No Child Left Behind does not address social conditions that affect children of poverty.
Table 1 helps to illustrate the subgroups according to state and federal guidelines. Of interest is the caveat that the federal government put on special education, which the state had left alone. The federal guidelines placed a 3% cap on special education students that can be screened out of taking the normal standardized test that regular education students are assigned to take. That means the only special education students that can exempt out of taking the test are developmentally challenged students and severely handicapped students. This criterion did away with resource, or basic, classes. It placed all special education students not included in the 3% in with the regular education population. While the general public may see this measure as inconsequential, for teachers across America it posed a dilemma. With more students in the general education classrooms, more time is required from the teacher to address the special needs of the students in the class with unique disabilities. The teacher is held accountable for the outcomes of all students in his or her class, so the extra time allocated for ensuring all students are prepared for the test takes on new importance.
With a clear understanding of subgroups, the mechanism that moved schools to failure is easier to comprehend. The AYP system is the mechanism that drove schools to failure. Think back to 2002 when President Bush declared that by 2014 all students would be proficient on the test. This received wide acclaim and was accepted by most everyone as a wonderful goal to strive to accomplish. The problem, though, is that President Bush did not exclaim it as a worthy goal. He wrote it into law. In order to reach 100% proficiency, schools had to begin moving upward in their percentages applied to the student groups used for accountability. This means the subgroups, each subgroup graded independently, had to reach the percentage of passage established for that year. As the years went by from 2002 onward, the percentages went up, and so did the percentage of schools that failed. This is the AYP mechanism of control that brought schools to failure. A particular student population that did not receive proper instruction from their teachers did not bring on failure. It was the mechanism of control, the AYP accountability system, which incrementally over a period of time brought schools to failure. More importantly to comprehend, it did so by intent. This deliberate intent will be demonstrated throughout this book.
The accountability system installed with No Child Left Behind is an educational accountability program that hurts the very students that it advertised to help. It did more to widen the achievement gap than close it. It was designed to bring schools to failure so panic would break out across the educational landscape and acceptance would be given to a new brand of education that finally delivered total federal control over the states' jurisdiction of public education. The next chapter will deal more with the federal education system that created the problem with the schools throughout the country and how failing to meet standards placed schools on the road to restructure and closure.
CHAPTER 2Facing the Reality of No Child Left Behind
In the fall of 2012 I began to research an area of Austin, Texas, that was experiencing restructuring in the schools located on the east side of the city. This small but culturally vibrant community on the east side of Austin was in the process of losing one of the most important identifiers that brought them all together as a community of people—their neighborhood schools. These schools supported several generations of community members as they received their primary, middle, and high school education. When I looked into the phenomenon that was occurring in east Austin, I found out the elementary school (Whittaker, 2012), where generations of children received their primary education, was now renamed and restructured. It was operating as a public charter school. The middle school was being monitored and slated for takeover by the charter management company hired by Austin Independent School District (ISD). The high school in the feeder path of the elementary and middle school was scheduled to follow in the same restructuring path if the superintendent and board of trustees follow the same course of action. Before you cast too much blame on the school district, it is important to keep in mind that the course of action required of the district was mandated through NCLB law. It was federal law that dictated Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) Standards that caused the schools to fail and therefore not meet standards. District officials had no choice but to follow the law.
My research took me to another community, located just north of Houston, Texas, where an entire school district was dissolved. The Commissioner of Education for the State of Texas, acting through the Texas Education Agency, closed the North Forest Independent School District and disbanded the board of trustees due to years of failure to meet AYP federal standards and unacceptable ratings from the State of Texas. The school district was merged into the very large Houston Independent School District located next door just to the south of North Forest ISD. Upon closure of the school district, every professional employee lost his or her job. What happened in the east-side community in Austin and the North Forest ISD is a microcosm of what happened in communities across the country. To understand what they went through as a school and community is to understand the endgame of No Child Left Behind.
With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, termed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, along with its accountability system, schools are moving in a progressive path that ultimately leads to school failure and restructure (Mead, 2007) if the schools are not able to improve their accountability ratings. Provisions in NCLB address schools that fail to achieve prescribed mandates for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Across the country schools have reached the point of AYP failure and are now in the process of restructuring, which is mandated through NCLB law (Texas Education Agency, 2012b) and carried out by the state education agency. The parents of the east-side community of Austin and the educational professionals and parents of the North Forest ISD give testimony in this book of their struggle with the mandates of NCLB when taken to their final stage of school reform.
The Issue of Evaluation and Accountability
A closer look at some historical events will bring clarity and understanding to how the situation in Austin and North Forest ISD developed. In the fall of 2012, Chicago teachers were engulfed in a union strike that had them taking part in a walkout. Thousands of children were out of school over issues that the teachers' union was negotiating with Chicago's city officials. At stake were the usual pay discrepancies, but also at issue was the new evaluation policy that tied job security to the outcomes of the students' state assessment. To state it differently, the teachers' evaluations were linked to how their students performed on the state-mandated assessment, which was a hallmark of No Child Left Behind. Looming just ahead was the 2014 mandate of 100% proficiency on the math and reading portions of the mandated state assessment that was written into No Child Left Behind policy:
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis is critical of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's push to make great use of standardized tests in teacher reviews, calling the process flawed. Union officials say the system wouldn't do enough to take into account outside factors such as poverty, crime and homelessness. (Omer, 2012, para. 3)
The evaluation of the students' overall performances on the mandated assessment lay at the heart of the issue. The variables that came into play with individual students substantially differed on any given day and had a bearing on the students' performance. The difference in economic and social conditions in various regions of the country made the one-size-fits- all approach problematic. In a previous study on school accountability, Popham (1999) highlighted the problems with judging school quality and effectiveness by how students performed on a standardized achievement test. "Because student performances on standardized achievement tests are heavily influenced by three causative factors, only one of which is linked to instructional quality, asserting that low or high test scores are caused by the quality of instruction is illogical" (Popham, 1999, para. 33). According to Popham, the three causative factors are "(1) what's taught in school, (2) a student's native intellectual ability, and (3) a student's out-of-school learning" (1999, para. 36). Yet written into law by President George W. Bush is the mandate that by 2014 all students must show proficiency on both the reading and math portion of the state assessment. In order to get districts prepared for the 2014 date, the proficiency percentage continues to steadily climb each year. In 2011, the AYP percentages required to meet standards were (Texas Education Agency, 2011) 80% in Reading/ Language Arts and 75% in Math. In the 2012–2013 school year, the percentages climb higher; and by the testing dates of 2014, the 100% mandate is required. Superintendents all over the nation know that means failure for their schools and their district.
In order to allow school districts to escape the 100% mandate, President Obama reached out to the states and agreed to extend a waiver option that included in the waiver package an exemption of the 100% mandate. If the states could come up with an acceptable alternative plan (Center on Education Policy, 2012) that conformed to the provisions laid down in the waiver package, then the state was excluded from the 2014 mandate. The plan submitted by each state had to contain an increase in professional development and a new acceptable evaluation for teachers and principals that were tied into accountability standards related back to the state assessment. The idea of starting over with a new evaluation system is already proving extremely costly to the states seeking to be in compliance just to submit an application for the waiver.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Takeover of Public Education in America by A. Patrick Huff. Copyright © 2015 A. Patrick Huff, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, xi,Prologue, xv,
Chapter 1 The Current State of Public Education in America, 1,
Chapter 2 Facing the Reality of No Child Left Behind, 6,
Chapter 3 A Carefully Crafted Agenda, 33,
Chapter 4 Research Conducted in Pursuit of the Grounded Theory, 81,
Chapter 5 Conclusions and Recommendations for the Future, 121,
Epilogue, 144,
References, 148,