The Opt-Out Option; Parental Protests Against Over-Testing

Bottom line: NYS wants to use "high-stakes testing" to see how well schools (and teachers) are teaching the material that can be readily tested. This is great, except that it forces schools (and teachers) to concentrate on that material to the exclusion of whatever has to be left off those tests, and sometimes the leftover material is crucial. "Teaching to the test" is inevitable -- and bad. A lot of parents choose to protest by having their children opt out of the evaluative tests.

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Our outgoing Superintendent posts Guidance for the Upcoming State Exams - Dr. Bowers - SuperintendentHamilton CSD

Recently, we have had a number of students ask questions about the school's reaction if a parent or child "refuses" to take the 3rd - 8th grade State Assessments. Attached please find a copy of the letter that was sent home to parents to clarify the district's viewpoint.

The crucial paragraphs:

   As per prior memorandum from the New York State Education Department (NYSED), please be aware that low assessment participation rates could adversely impact a school district's funding or increased state oversight of local school functions.

   Therefore it will be our practice to provide each student with a copy of each examination that students in that grade level are required to complete. Parents that wish for the child to be released from State testing must communicate their "intent of refusal" to HCS, before the exam is given. Upon receipt of the refusal, the district will arrange an alternative activity and the student will read quietly in an alternate location, rather than complete the examination. Their exam will be coded as "not tested." Although the student will not be penalized for the refusal, the school district may experience the effects described above.

It's pretty much what I remember her saying at the BoE meeting I put here but she did say a bit about the opt-out movement being even stronger downstate. Here's a video summary from NYS Allies for Public Education: They disagree with one point in Dr. Bowers' letter: they note that the threat of impact on school funding has not been carried through yet, and they don't believe it will be. A variety of web sites have more information, such as Opt Out CNY

dedicated to informing the Central New York public about the negative negative impact that high-stakes standardized tests are having on children and public education... How to REFUSE NYS Grade 3-8 TESTS

There are forums like the Onondaga Forum to focus on opting children out of state tests, other Common Core issues | syracuse.com As that "other Common Core issues" suggests, it's a national issue; United Opt Out National has a New York section, but there's nothing that special about us.

The Defiant Parents: Opting Out of Testing : The New Yorker

Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities.

Basically I see this as a protest against a trend: US education has been increasingly test-directed, which is great from a data-guy's point of view except for the minor fact that the most important parts of education aren't readily testable, so they tend to be squeezed out by teachers and schools who are evaluated on how well their kids do on the standardized parts. If this goes on, we could end up with an education system which generates excellent PISA scores but whose graduates are unable to think for themselves; really good at solving simple word problems but unable to create, unable to innovate, not even particularly good at working together. That's scary. If you're interested in the issue, I'd suggest that you check some of my posts mentioning Yong Zhao who spoke at HCS a while ago, or just watch the (long) videos at NYC Public School Parents: Video: Yong Zhao on how high-stakes testing is damaging our schools

Check out Yong Zhao's terrific (and funny!) presentation on October 12, along with the question and answer session, co-sponsored by Class Size Matters, GEM, Time out From Testing, and Parents Across America.

Prof. Zhao is the nation's most eloquent critic of high-stakes testing and discusses how the current education reform agenda is taking our nation's schools in entirely wrong direction.

Schools, Teens, Sleep, Research, Politics

One of the more important/interesting educator's blogs is Larry Cuban's; usually it's about research, or about his career as teacher and superintendent. Recently, though, he blogged on the way that research takes a subordinate (but still essential?) role in the school-district political process, using the story of "17-year-old Jilly Dos Santos" as the center. BTW, I hope everybody knows that we could (with pretty high confidence) improve high school learning outcomes by starting the day later. If not, read the links. And we don't do that because...well, mostly because it's not convenient. Cuban's point is about research within politics....he doesn't go all that far, but it's something to think of. Often.

Politics, Research, and School Reform: Letting Teens Sleep in

Santos created a Facebook page and Twitter account telling hundreds of fellow  students that the school board was going to start school at 7:20 AM. She contacted a non-profit group about sleep that gave her the scientific studies about how teenagers needed more, not less, sleep. She emailed all teachers in the district and started an online petition. She brought other students together and they made posters. She tweeted everyone that “If you are going to be attending the board meeting tomorrow we recommend you dress up.”

You guessed it. The school board turned down the earlier start time. A few months later, the coalition that Santos had pulled together worked successfully to get the school board to start high school at 9 AM. The superintendent said after the board voted 6-1 in favor of the later time: “Jilly kicked it over the edge for us.”

Who said that schools are apolitical institutions?...

Without the political muscle of the coalition Santos and others mobilized, ho-hum responses from the school board would have occurred.

Well, maybe nobody said schools are apolitical institutions.

(And if so, nobody was wrong. At least about that.)

HCS Budget Trends

Ferdinand provides some older HCS budgets as PDF files. Here we have the 2009-10 with proposed 2010-11; direct link here.

And here's the 2012-13 with proposed 2013-14; direct link here:

Board of Education Meeting, Tuesday 2014-03-18

It's really nice to have the BoE meetings put up on YouTube; unfortunately there was no microphone in front of Diana Bowers (Superintendent until July) so that answers to some questions are not audible to me, except in bits and pieces. Also, some BoE members leaned back too far from the microphones, sometimes. Anyway, I'll set it here with notes below so that you can find segments for particular speakers or subjects. Umm, I skipped the FFA presentation somewhere early, I see...sorry, it's not what I was focused on. (But the state FFA convention will be here, with local schools including HCS as hosts; it seems to rotate among all the participating schools.)

Bottom Line, as I understand it: We can't save money by refinancing any of our debt; we can save some by not keeping our "resource officer" (policeman), we will probably save some with an "interim Superintendent" being paid less than Diana has been paid and we may save quite a bit if that interim Superintendent is part-time or shared with another district. We may save a trivial amount of money on the GEA if the House amendment to the NY budget goes through, or a small but non-trivial amount if the Senate goes through; the Senate version does end the GEA in 2016--2017, and they have different rules about going past the tax cap (which is 2.21% this year.) We have a long-term problem of sustainability in that our instructional budget has been rising more slowly than inflation for years, while the Special Education program has risen rapidly; it's not clear that anything can be done about that, but in a world of limited resources it is unfortunately fair to say that we (and other NY districts) have increasingly been doing special education instead of general education; resources have been redirected, and the tax cap says they can't be increased at the same pace. Perhaps it has to be that way. Meanwhile, we can certainly save money by cutting art, which doesn't seem to be covered in the testing which evaluates how well HCS is doing, so obviously it's not important. (end sarcasm)

6:50--13:55 Barbara Houze, retiring art teacher; she's unhappy at being replaced by a total of 0.7 part-time people who, by "magic math", will be able to cover the actual classes, but the art program will have no planner, advisor, or advocate; only the actual classes will be covered.
14:00-16:00 John Knecht spoke up as artist and educator, to say that art should be treated like chemistry or history or math or any other academic subject. (I doubt this; I think of art as a category of subjects, not as a subject; it's of very little importance if we're just training workers with specific skills, but immense importance if we want the creative class, the "black-collar" entrepreneurs/innovators/designers/scientists of the 21st century. Or if we want artists, I suppose.)
16:20--18:15 Denise Leone as a "visiting artist at HCS" said that we evaluate cultures based on their art, and she wanted to understand why art is among the first items to be cut ... to understand the process. Molly Johnson replied that it's not, (a) it's not decided if the art will be cut and anyway (b) we've been cutting a lot for a long time and (c) the process is open, working through open meetings and openly available documents like those at boarddocs for this meeting.
20:00--21 Audrey Miller spoke as a parent of a child who hates school except art/music; this is not about saving the art program, it's about saving the children.
21--22 An HCS art student whose name I can't hear (upd: Sydney Craven) said that a lot of kids need an arts background for what they hope to do with their lives, especially of course if that involves application to an art school. It was well-spoken.
22--24 Lynn Schwarzer talked about the amazing changes wrought by the art teacher who ought to be given a full-time position, after decades of relative inadequacy at HCS. She also talked about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education broadening into STEAM education (I just can't think what that "A" could stand for, but I'd be happy to buy an Evil Mad Scientist STEAM T-shirt for each BoE member; I did long ago link to STEAM Learning Network site: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, to STEAM: A Framework for Teaching Across the Disciplines, and just as an example to Maker Faire and Science Education: American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. - Slate Magazine.)

Art/music/theatre good, tests bad. (All right, all right -- tests are good for some things, just not for all we now use them for. Art/music/theatre good.)
24-- Carolyn Hsu wanted to know about the specific rules and limits for donations...I could hear Diana's response when I was sitting there, but I can't hear enough of it on the video.
28:15--Stephanie McClintick, as a local artist, wanted further clarification....
31:10--Molly (BoE) Somewhat into the next phase, thanks for and acceptance of the Sports Boosters donation.
31:30--40:00 Embarking on search for the next Superintendent; nothing solid yet, but looks like it has to be an interim.
40:--46 Molly, Diana, Bud -- policy on testing and opt-outs chosen by students or parents.
46--Aaron on opt-out consequences; if fewer than 95% of students participate for two consecutive years, there might be financial consequences but it's not clear in the regulations; there will be a reclassification of the school as not being "in good standing" which might hurt college applications, but (Diana) there may be a lot of downstate schools in this situation and college admissions people will understand.
47 Kevin Ellis continues same topic, but I can't hear him.
52--1:00:30 Matt Crumb on 2.21% tax cap calculation, on failure to save money by refinancing debt, and on House and Senate bills to amend the Governor's proposed budget. Get Your Protests In Before April 1st!
1:00:30 Bill Dowsland on Senior class trip to Hershey Park.
1:01 Susan Marafino pointing out that the "resource officer" is costing us $20K/year, which may be money well spent but it might be money better spent e.g. on keeping the art program going, and that a part-time rather than full-time Superintendent might save even more. (Molly replies that there is some savings implicit in having an interim Superintendent anyway, who will get a lower salary than Diana has received.)
1:05:40 Ellen Larson on testing and teacher evaluation, which ought to be separate.
1:07:50 Ryan Solomon contrasts South African actual violence with American over-protectiveness and would rather spend the resource officer's cost on art; applause suggests that this is a popular view.
1:08:50 Ferdinand von Muench talks about the art and strings programs which seem to be at risk; we just need to follow the library's example with a 3.6% tax increase. He wants to encourage people to go to the next public Finance Planning meeting, but it hasn't been rescheduled yet. He makes two major points: our Administration costs are high, with 6 people to do the admin that other similar-size schools do with 4. (Note that the most expensive of these is of course the superintendent; as he knows but does not say, "School superintendents get paid more than governors in a dozen states: New Jersey, New York,...". So a part-time or shared superintendent might be a really good buy for a financially stretched district. And Special Education of which he is very much in favor, but there is a question of sustainability. (See "bottom line" above, or better yet listen to what he's saying. The recent growth in special education is substantially larger than our deficit; the GEA is larger than our deficit; life is difficult.)


Well, I guess I ran out of steam (not STEAM) as I approached the end, but I'll post this and hope it's somewhat useful to somebody. Error-correction would be appreciated.

Update: Radio Free Hamilton reports here. Sadly, the first comment is "Are these all the same people that voted against the merger. Do they truly not get it and see what they caused". This appears to reflect a failure to realize that some of us turned against the merger when we realized that according to the merger study, it wasn't actually a money-saver -- the economy of scale (reduced staff) and diseconomy of scale (more transport) were quite close to balance. It's certainly probable that most or all of those speaking voted accordingly--I dunno. Obviously, most of Hamilton did. (It was a money-shifter, and that gets complicated. Never mind.) So it goes.

Budget Coffee, March 5

Email from school (Debbie Kirley) on 2014-03-04: "Good morning. Just a reminder that Dr. Bowers will be holding a Budget Coffee tomorrow, 3/5, morning @ 9:00 a.m. in the Cafeteria."

Wikipedia on HCS

I often use Wikipedia as a reference. Let this be a reminder to me: Never Trust Anybody. As of March 3, 2014, I see Hamilton Central School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hamilton Central School, located on West Kendrick Avenue, Hamilton, New York was established in 1946. It educates Students in K-12 with an average class size of 45 and a teacher to student ratio of 1:10.

I suppose they mean "grade size", or class size as in "class of 2014"; with 13 grades and 578 kids the average grade size is actually 44.46. I don't know the actual overall average class size, if that even means anything (different kinds of classes have different average sizes) but the district web site says

Average class sizes for elementary and core secondary subjects range from 14-22.

Plausible. And of course the Wikipedia page does link to the source.

Budget Coffee, February 26

Sorry for not posting this earlier; I was out of town, which shouldn't have been the problem it was. These are Astrid Helfant's notes from the Wednesday's "budget coffee". The news is very slightly improved. I'm puzzled, though, in that I don't see a discussion of the 2.5 straightforwardly financial options:

  (1) refinancing debt, some of which was incurred with higher interest rates;
  (2) Ken's bond to fund the natural gas installation, so that we benefit immediately instead of with a year's lag;
  (2.5) Ferdinand's extension of (2), to include cogeneration following the example of Madison-Oneida BOCES.

Anyway:

Diana opened meeting at 7pm. Tonight's numbers are a bit better. Matt Crumb was given the floor.

Three handouts. 5 year GEA history. Four year GEA history - Matt added a fifth year. Over 3 million dollars total taken. 

Next document. 2.21% allowable tax levy increase. In dollars 142,832.

Matt discussed ERS and TRS.

Inflation rate: roughly 2%

Pilot agreement - none

Matt brought up that we will have to decrease the tax levy for next year as a result of a debt being paid off. I'm hoping someone else can pitch in here explaining this concept a bit. 

Colgate used to pay $200,0000 and that amount will continue. The additional $300,000 was just meant for three years. The last year of that coming up 2014 2015. Since this is a non-binding payment is not considered to be part of the pilot payments. 

Last document. We are assuming a debt of close to $200,000 for upcoming budget year. All employees salaries are in negotiations. Health insurance is going up. More specialty drugs and more high expense health cases. 8.5% increase.

Personal changes through attrition: -$60,000

Projected deficit: 1.5% wage increase -> $140,000 deficit

2.0% wage increase -> $166,000

2.5% wage increase -> $192,000

See document for additional numbers.

Staffing cuts:

Total cuts 3-4 fte instead of 4-5 fte

Hire 0.7 art teacher instead of 1.0 = 0.3 fte savings

Morning and afternoon pre-k instead of two mornings classes

0.5 fte savings

One of the long term subs would be released as a result of this pre-k change. That's almost 2 fte.

The remaining 1.5 cut still will be decided. Not ready for release yet.

Also some savings through new life christian school.

Astrid asked some questions about GEA and 2% versus increasing tax levy beyond 2% and when the board would decide this. April was the answer. And no we cannot count on a GEA cut this year.

March 13 Thursday from 4:30-9pm. Budget work-shop meetings. To be held at elementary library. 

Stephanie asked about school bus purchases. The answer: 2 per year historically and now it's only one per year. 

Transportation aid is the highest.

Ferdinand: Time table for budget versus contract negotiations? Basically best guess. Budget calendar is only what is certain - The May deadline vote. 

Lorna Wilson: Are these deficits normal? Diana: normal for the last 4-5 years.....

Ellen: How knowledgeable is public about tax cap bribe? Matt: I don't know....

After this we discusses off topic about state testing and the anxiety this creates among students.

End of the meeting around 8:30pm