Changes Coming To A School Near You

In a recent communication, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg stated, “Visit most any classroom today, and it’s likely to look very different than the classroom of 20 or 30 years ago when many of us were in school.”

I agree with the superintendent, though probably not for the same reasons.

During a recent visit at an elementary school, all students were assembled in the gym. They were drilled by an exuberant principal and asked what to do and not to do during TCAP, the yearly Colorado-wide assessments that are mandated in public institutions.

As a child I never had to memorize a pro-testing mantra. Things have indeed changed.

Dramatically altered landscape

Following in the footsteps of DPS’ former superintendent Michael Bennet who was a proponent of educational reforms, Superintendent Boasberg has instituted a number of changes in the district that have dramatically altered the landscape of public education in Denver.

Following a national movement started with No Child Left Behind under President Bush and pushed forward by President Obama’s Race to the Top policy, the reform movement advocates better measurable outcomes for students, teachers, and schools. The measuring tools being used are high-stakes tests (CSAP, TCAP and next year PARCC).

It is reasonable to want to know how children are performing and how schools are preparing them for their futures. However, measuring a teacher’s success in the classroom by student test scores is not a sound policy. First and foremost not all students come to school with the same experiences and abilities.

Studies have shown that test score results reflect a student’s socio-economic background. Children with more opportunities to learn at an early age have higher test scores and better academic growth.

It is laudable to want every child, no matter the zip code, to have access to an excellent school. Yet, not acknowledging the effects of the growing rate of child poverty in Colorado does not improve the overall education of our citizens. According to Kids Count, 224,000 children lived in poverty in Colorado in 2012. As more and more funds are allocated to reforms and testing, the core issue – poverty – is overlooked and students continue to fall through the cracks.

Test scores give the district the weapon and the power needed to shut down schools and transform them into “better performing schools.” But the results are mixed and lead to many failures, disproportionately disenfranchising poor communities over and over.

In Park Hill in recent years, three school programs have failed in the Smiley building: Envision Schools Colorado, Venture Prep Middle School and Smiley Middle School. On March 12, Alyssa Whitehead-Bust, DPS Chief of Innovation and Reform, stated in a congressional testimony to the Education & The Workforce Committee that, “We have closed 20 schools across governance types in the past five years; 10 of those 20 were charter schools because they were not meeting our accountability expectations.” That is a bad track record for a district that opens and shutters schools at record speed.

Another case in point is Manual High School, which has been going through reforms since 2006 and is again in a state of crisis. None of the reforms enacted there by the district have produced significantly better test scores. When a community is in constant “reform mode,” it does not have the stability to be sustainable.

Winners and losers

Based on competition, education reforms assume that the strong will outlive the weak. Thus, there must be winners and losers. Such status is predicated on mandated testing and a system that does not elevate struggling schools but instead continues to weaken them until they can be easily destroyed.

In order to find space for mushrooming new schools, DPS has systematically tagged certain schools for closure. The district creates instability in these schools and then targets them until they implode. Schools like Manual and Smiley have had multiple principals in just a few years. The principal at Smith Elementary has been successful there but is now being moved to Columbine Elementary, creating havoc at two schools.

Every year DPS puts out a “Call for Quality Schools” that seeks applications for new schools. Most proposals are accepted. All are charter, innovation or performance schools. These models are predicated on the school having a degree of independence from district rules.

DPS is steadily outsourcing its educational mission to Education Management Organizations (charter management) or to innovation or performance schools where the district has little involvement in how the schools are run. By doing so, DPS is stating that it can no longer be trusted to make the best curricular, human resource, budgetary or management decisions for taxpayer schools. Instead it is putting together a menu of services (such as payroll, cafeteria, transportation) that it offers the schools under its purview.

Big money in education

Educational reforms have been named “corporate” because they follow a corporate competition model whereby strong schools are expected to replace weak ones and strong teachers replace the ineffective ones.

The capitalist model, however, assumes that everyone has the same capability of participating in the “market.” Children and their parents, however, do not all start this race on par nor can they participate in the race with the same supports, be it transportation, access to the internet, extended family, etc. The district will state that their performance measurements take this into account but they simply do not compensate for the advantages that economic stability and comfort afford.

The term corporate reform also refers to the many corporations that have “invested” in this educational model. At the national level, policy is backed with funds from Bill Gates and other philanthropists. By allocating money to nonprofits, departments of education, school districts, foundations, institutions and businesses, they have underwritten the Common Core.

In Colorado, the organization Colorado Succeeds, whose membership is a conglomerate of businesses, has received $400,000 from the Gates Foundation to lobby for more reforms, more teacher evaluations, and more measurable outcomes. The Colorado Legacy Foundation received more than $6 million for teacher evaluation systems and DPS has received more than $26 million in grants from the Gates Foundation. These are but a drop in the education reform bucket.

Why put all this money into reform? Because education is big business. Alleviating the effects of poverty does not reap profits for corporations. From curriculum materials, pre-testing and testing materials, guidelines, implementation of new technologies, standardized testing is big business with a constant flow of new students that need to be assessed. Contracts with companies like McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson run in the millions and sometimes billions while budgets to local schools are being slashed yearly.

Testing – and more – to go online

Test-driven reforms require systems that can organize and analyze the data. Paralleling the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, is a tracking system to measure students’ abilities from Pre-K through college. This is why, starting next year with the implementation of PARCC assessments and the Common Core, students will be tested online.

What data will be collected is still murky but it will go far beyond test results.

Dan Domagala, Chief Information Officer for the Colorado Department of Education, presented a plan for interconnected data, tracking students and their educators starting at the Pre-K level and linking that information to K-12 schools, social services, the department of corrections, higher education and finally labor. It would behoove parents to be vigilant about the fine line between technology and privacy, between “enhancing performance” and Big Brother.

Advocating for all children

As parents, we have been left with an inability to plan our children’s K-12 education because schools are under attack. The drug of choice, to convince us of the need for school overhauls, is test scores. The district and the Colorado Department of Education go to great lengths to publicize schools’ performance records. We seek them, tirelessly figuring out how a school is faring, comparing it to other scores from other schools. We are addicted to test scores.

With an ineffective union, teachers are at the mercy of Senate Bill 10-191 that ties them down to their test scores. Principals thrive or fail based on the color-coded performance of their schools.

Taxpayers who fund and send their children to Denver’s public schools are the only ones who have power to enact change.

First we must recognize that the testing industry is the blood supply of educational reforms. Without standardized testing, the reforms have nowhere to go. By playing into the popularity game of choice and color coded schools, the puppeteers place us exactly where they want us, fighting over some schools while neglecting others.

For a nation that has grown and blossomed because of independence of thinking, creative solution and drive, this is a killer, creating common children for the testing and corporate pipeline.

We need to advocate for all children, for school systems, both national and local, which support learning and creativity. Our children will then be ready for a more than “college or career” – they will be ready to build their own futures.

Lynn Kalinauskas is Chair of the Education Committee for the Greater Park Hill Community.