An Open Letter to Gov. Murphy on School Reopening

Dear Gov. Murphy,

Within the next two weeks, school districts across New Jersey will be reopening in some way, shape or form. And while every district's plans will, no doubt, look different, one thing is the same from High Point to Cape May: this is a hot mess. 

In March, you gave us a clear directive to prepare for 100% virtual teaching until the end of that month. Educators across the state rose to the challenge as you very sensibly guided us through the rest of the school year one month at a time, checking the spread of the Coronavirus and its impact on our state's population. During that time, we were able to hone our skills and fine-tune our plans to deliver the very best virtual curriculum we could. We were proud of what we were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, and I personally was so proud to count my governor, whom I supported from the get-go, right up there with Gov. Andrew Cuomo as one who took this pandemic seriously and took decisive steps to contain it despite the heavy criticism you faced. You did it right and your efforts paid off. 

But as spring rolled into summer, the numbers started to rise—especially in children. Just last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that "children and teenagers account for a growing share of coronavirus cases in Camden and Gloucester Counties, mirroring a national — and ominous — trend as young people rebel against social distancing rules, health experts say." 

Over the past few months, administrators, boards of education, community members and staff in every district have been working diligently on reopening plans (I was proud to serve on my district's reopening committee), the logistics of which often resembling a Rube Goldberg concoction. But now, with mere days until students arrive, many districts are ditching those plans and going 100% virtual—mine included—leaving parents and staff in the lurch as we all scramble to figure out how we are going to make it work in our homes and in our classrooms. Many districts have cited any or all of the following as their main stumbling blocks to reopening:

• Back ordered PPEs
• Inadequate HVAC systems and lack of air conditioning in many schools
• Many classrooms without windows or operable windows 
• Mold
• Inadequate classroom space to properly social distance
• Students having to eat in their classrooms
• Inability to social distance students on busses
• Staff members who are at high risk requesting medical leaves
• Shortage of substitutes to fill those positions
• Proper accommodations for students with special needs
• Available staff to properly clean buildings at the end of the day
• Inability of staff to clean equipment and certain classrooms in between classes

All of that costs money—which is in chronically short supply in many districts. Add to that the staggering cost of providing electronic devices to every student for home use, and a hybrid model just doesn't make sense. Where is this money supposed to come from? This is arguably the most expensive unfunded mandate ever imposed on schools.

Parents need to go back to work, children need to go back to school, teachers want to go back to school, but we cannot let the abject failure of leadership in Washington force us into reopening for in-person instruction when it is clearly not safe to do so. Yes, there will be learning loss, but what is the alternative? Is spreading this virus and risking the lives of more people worth that cost? If restaurants cannot be open for indoor dining, if gyms are still closed, if many businesses are still operating remotely, how can you, in good conscience, expect schools to reopen for in-person learning? Have you ever been in a kindergarten or preschool classroom? Do you know how much time teachers spend teaching those little ones about personal space, personal hygiene and keeping their hands to themselves? As you did in the spring, you must put the health and welfare of our students and staff above all else. New Jersey has come so far in beating back this menace. You can't ease up.

I am urging you to order all New Jersey schools to go to virtual instruction for at least the first two months of the school year with a plan to reassess at the end of October. During that time, I ask that you work with the state board of education to develop SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) goals, based on CDC recommendations, for every district to ensure we are doing everything we can to protect the health of our students and staff. 

Please, don't let New Jersey slide backwards. We can't afford to mess this up.

Respectfully,

Marie

The @StarLedger, #FakeNews & the #PARCC Propaganda Machine

Years before 'fake news' became a household word, New Jersey's largest newspaper, The Star Ledger started its very own propaganda machine to bash teachers and prop up PARCC testing. 

With the flurry of PARCC testing bills posted in Trenton in the past couple of weeks, the state's largest newspaper and education 'reform' cheerleader has been shaking its pom-pons recently in favor of the deeply flawed test, tossing out wild claims with little evidence to back them up (all emphasis mine):

Phil Murphy has long strained to appease powerful critics of the PARCC, namely the teacher’s union, which prefers we let kids graduate without the kind of tests that hold teachers accountable. 

The idea that an invalid, poorly designed and un-vetted test can hold teachers "accountable" is simply illogical. The Ledger offers no evidence to support this far-fetched claim. Even the Christie administration wasn't so sure it would work because they kept changing the test's percentage of our evaluations seemingly at random.

But we need the PARCC because an A in Millburn is not the same as an A in Camden. We have to ensure that all kids succeed, not just those in affluent districts.

If the Ledger's only measure of success is the number of prestigious colleges and universities a school's students attend, then why aren't they raising a ruckus about all those students in Camden who have been denied rich, deep curriculums in the arts, humanities, foreign languages and technology (like they have in Millburn) because the state decided the best way to 'fix' their schools is to cut their funding, deny public input, silence parents and test the kids to death? That would never, ever happen in Millburn, and no test will ever close that disparity gap.

The PARCC and SBAC (Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium) tests were rolled out to assess student mastery of the Common Core State Standards that, along with carrot-and-stick financial incentives from the Obama administration, were supposed to level the educational playing field across all 50 states. The concept was that a child from New Jersey could move to Oregon and get the same education. Except that education reformers overlooked the fact that the United States is so culturally and economically diverse that a one size fits all education system is not appropriate. Schools in rural Central Oregon serve a very different student population—and have very different state funding—than students in Millburn NJ. Poverty plays a huge role in a child's chances for educational success. But The Ledger doesn't like to talk about that.

The Boston Globe recently tracked 93 local valedictorians and found that one in four failed to earn a college diploma in six years. Their high schools left them woefully underprepared. Some lost their scholarships. Others dropped out in frustration. We have the same problem in New Jersey. At Essex County College in Newark, 85 percent of incoming freshmen need to take remedial math. In 2017, only 13 percent graduated. While social promotion also happens in wealthier districts, those kids have a deeper safety net.  

I am not an education researcher, but from what I read in the Boston Globe study above, grade inflation—not standardized tests—is the main reason those students struggled in college. No educator with a lick of professionalism supports that, but sadly, it does happen, and 'reformers' themselves have been caught in the thick of some of the most controversial as we saw in the Washington, DC and Atlanta testing scandals.

And as for the remedial math and graduation rates at Essex County College, The Ledger assumes the PARCC test will fix those too, despite no mention of how long it had been since those students actually took a high school math class. And the fact that the school has been embroiled in turmoil, turnover and fiscal mismanagement for a few years—which was actually mentioned in the very same link—was apparently overlooked.

But The Star Ledger forges ahead!

This is why we need an objective test. Yet because the PARCC is such a powerful diagnostic tool that can trace a student’s learning problem right down to a particular teacher’s lesson, it ran afoul of the union. 

As Joe Biden would say, "What a load of malarky!" Sometimes I ask myself why I bother to respond to these sophomoric tropes, but as an educator, I believe I have an obligation to facts. And here are a few facts from a post I wrote back in 2016:  

1. The PARCC test is not diagnostic. In order for any test to accomplish this, it must have at least 25 questions per assessed skill. The PARCC does not. Bari Ehrlichson, Special Assistant to the Commissioner of Education, admitted this last year in a panel discussion on the PARCC.

2. The PARCC does not consistently assess grade-level skills. Rider University Professor and reading expert Russ Walsh analyzed some of the sample language arts questions and found many of them to be several grade levels above the tested grade. This is not only unfair to both students and teachers; it is also demoralizing to students. How can anyone be expected to succeed at something when the odds are heavily stacked against them from the start?

3. Research has shown that student designed projects and research are far more effective and meaningful ways for both teachers and students to assess deep learning and understanding. Standardized tests in general are meant to show trends, and as such, PARCC falls far short on the assessment continuum.

4. The American Statistical Association has warned that standardized tests should not be used to assess educator effectiveness because the methods being used are simply not reliable. And with the enormous emphasis now put on data in teaching, teachers should not be evaluated based on a flawed test that provides flawed data.

5. Out of the 24 states originally in the PARCC consortium only seven plus the District of Columbia will be participating in the 2016-2017 testing. This should be a red flag warning to every parent and educator.*

6. PARCC is not a reliable predictor of 'college and career readiness'. Recent research shows that high school GPAs are the most reliable predictor of college success. Yet all across this state—and country—related arts classes that help build those GPAs are being scaled back or eliminated to make way for more Common Core study and PARCC prep.    

7. A recently released study published in the School Superintendent Association's Journal of Scholarship and Practice concluded that a higher percentage of the 2009 New Jersey high school core curriculum content standards in English language arts and math prompted higher-order thinking than the 2010 Common Core State Standards for those same subjects and grade levels. We are dumbing down our students. 

8. The amount of testing students will be subjected to starting with the graduating class of 2020 is not only against current law, it’s just plain cruel. Starting with this class, in order to graduate high school, students will have to take and fail the PARCC not once, not twice, but three times before any real assessment of their academic progress can be used. What educator in their right mind thinks this is best practice?

9. There are big problems with scoring. Officials from PARCC have admitted there are discrepancies in scores between students who took paper and pencil tests vs. those who took the test online, with the former group scoring on average higher than the latter. And, despite PARCC's promise of leveling the playing field for all students in all states, the PARCC consortium states have the option to change their cut scores. This is nuts.

10. The fact that in its recently released report, the Study Commission On The Use Of Student Assessments in New Jersey failed to honor and recognize the hundreds of people who testified against this test, and instead recommended a marketing campaign* to crush the Opt-Out movement and brainwash parents and the general public into thinking it will solve all the world’s problems is proof that this test cannot stand on its own merit and should be thrown out.

* The PARCC consortium is now down to two states: New Jersey and New Mexico.

In a 2015 interview, Shani Robinson, one of the teachers caught up in the Atlanta cheating scandal had this to say about all that testing:

Who should really be held accountable for cheating the children? Our children have been cheated by those who have willfully torn apart black communities through displacement and gentrification, underfunded and privatized public schools, and then have criminalized black educators for a dysfunctional system that was designed to fail. ... I feel like this case is extremely important because public education is under attack, as we've seen in places where teachers are striking, and the cheating scandal was used to portray public education as a failure and justify privatizing schools.  

Privatizing public schools... that is the story The Star Ledger should be covering.