Dave Chandler

The Trades and Crafts Option

Another voice in favor of a more balance approach to education after high schhool ... college isn't for everyone. Presenting the economic option of trades and crafts to our high schoolers as a career path is equally as legitimate and necessary as the college degree avenue.

Forget Harvard and a 4-Year Degree, You Can Make More as a Plumber in the Long Run, Says Prof. Kotlikoff | Tech-Ticker/Yahoo! Finance

The Definitive CSAP Opt-Out Letter

Asserting our rights as parents and/or guardians to ensure the most nurturing, beneficial and productive manner of educating our own children -- that is the fundamental goal of folks who opt-out their student from the Colorado Standardized Assessment Program (CSAP) test.

This year I have personally received more telephone calls and email inquiries about how to "get my child out of CSAP" than ever before.

The primary concern is over the oppressive and demoralizing effects on students of hour after hour, day after day, week after week of testing, test preparation, CSAP propagandization (pep rallies, banners, contests), and heavy-handed administrative pressure demanding performance ... or else.

The problem this testing regimen highlights: teachers not allowed the creativity to teach nor the freedom to innovate curriculum for their students because ... CSAP scoring demands rigid, tightly controlled production of data primarily for the use of administrators, educrats and politicians.

When the effects of the current top-down 'No Child Left Behind' and 'Race to the Top' educational policies become detrimental to encouraging the joy of learning for your child, then it becomes the obligation of parents and/or guardians to take charge and to at least just say 'no' to CSAP.

To this end, I am pleased to reproduce here what seems to me to be the 'definitive' CSAP opt-out letter, penned originally by a concerned and involved parent frrom northern Colorado. I say definitive because it provides sincerity and sound research so school principals can clearly understand the rights of parents.

Feel free to cut and paste the letter into your word processing program and modify it to suit your own particular situation.

Courage.

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Dear _______________:

This is written notification that ____________ will not be taking the CSAP this year.

Colorado Revised Statutes 22-1-123-(5)(a) states that students cannot be tested or evaluated without written consent. I do not give my consent for my child to take the CSAP.

I have thoroughly researched the issue. One of the things I keep hearing from many uninformed/misinformed people is that my student's CSAP score of a zero (for opting out) would negatively affect her class/the school/district – not so. Please see the following:

“There is no federal law prohibiting a parent from opting their child out of CSAP testing.” -- Jo O’Brien, Assistant Commissioner of Standards, Colorado Department of Education

“Students who do not test, including those who do so due to parental refusal, are counted as non-participants when determining participation rates for state and federal accountability purposes.” -- Jo O’Brien, Assistant Commissioner of Standards, Colorado Department of Education

“For calculating performance, non-participant data are not counted as zeroes – they are excluded from the calculation... So the calculations are performed on the basis solely of students that took the test and had valid scores on it.” -- Jo O’Brien, Assistant Commissioner of Standards, Colorado Department of Education

“School academic performance ratings (SAR) will no longer be assigned for Colorado schools. The Education Accountability Act of 2009 (SB 09-163) repealed previous SAR law. Negative weights for Unsatisfactory and No Score percentages are not in effect anymore.” -- Angela Engel, Family Leadership Training Institute Facilitator, Policy Adviser, past Denver school teacher and administrator

Parental rights are broadly protected by United States Supreme Court decisions (Meyer and Pierce), especially in the area of education. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that parents posses the “fundamental right” to “direct the upbringing and education of their children.” Furthermore, the Court declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the State: those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right coupled with the high duty to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 534-35) The Supreme Court criticized a state legislature for trying to interfere “with the power of parents to control the education of their own.” (Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 402.) In Meyer, the Supreme Court held that the right of parents to raise their children free from unreasonable state interferences is one of the unwritten "liberties" protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (262 U.S. 399).

As for my reasons to opt my children from CSAP, see the following:

CSAP costs Colorado $50,000,000 plus annually. $50 million plus is what it costs to prepare, administer and grade CSAP. Why not invest that money in our kids, teachers and schools?

Colleges could care less about CSAP scores. Transcripts, ACT and SAT scores count.

Since the implementation of NCLB and CSAP, graduation rates (especially for minorities) have not increased, instead they have declined.

Since the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and CSAP, more resources have placed into money, time for: preparation, implementation, and updating for CSAP. Yet, the ratio of students per teacher is increasing; not to mention cuts to classes such as art, P.E., and music, or diminished time in which students can eat their lunch.

School/District accountability is great. Over-testing, over-stressing, and placing absolute value of my child’s capabilities on one flawed standardized test is not.

Please know that I have expressed my concerns to my elected representatives as well.

It is very unfortunate, that legislation such as NCLB and demand for over-testing children has taken a life of it’s own to the point that it pins schools and parents against each other – it should not be so. Obviously, our federal officials recognize the current system as it stands is flawed, thus, legitimizing my concerns.

In closing, please know that a parent from another school afforded me the opportunity to read the District’s Administrative memo to principals which referred to “Talking Points” when dealing with opt-out parents. I was very disappointed but not surprised that District Administrators have issued a script for principals. I will not be coming in for a meeting regarding this issue and I will not be signing any additional papers relating to this matter.

As far as I am concerned, No simply means No.

Sincerely,

________________

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Also see: www.TheCBE.org

The CSAP Curse

The first part of this article was published in the print version of the Denver Post's YourHub.com for Arvada, Wheat Ridge and Westminster on Thursday, March 11, 2011.

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No CSAP this year for my daughter!

Yup, high school juniors don't take the CSAP test ... so for the first time in six years I haven't submitted an "opt out" letter to the school principal.

But the curse of CSAP remains. At Pomona High School even for the seniors and juniors not taking the CSAP the next two weeks will result in many days of lost learning time. 'Testing schedules' are in effect ... for six days out of the next ten my daughter and all the juniors and seniors don't go to school until nearly noon, have only one or two classes and it's right back home (or wherever they go after school).

Of course, there was also last week's CSAP pep rally -- maybe some kids learned some cheers -- but more classroom time lost.

Hours and hours of valuable time that students could have been spent learning is spent on CSAP test preparation (ie., 'teaching to the test' also known as 'gaming' the test), rallying for testing, and the testing itself.

In other words, Colorado's kids have been cheated out of days of education. And the point of all this testing? When all is said and done it is about providing politicians and government bureaucrats with an excuse for why their "reform" agenda is failing.

So, whether or not CSAP has started for your student or not, I still encourage parents to remove their child from this anti-learning, demoralizing testing regimen -- opt out now! Here's the web site with the 'opt out' letter you can print to hand to your principal: Coalition for Better Education.

Your child will forever appreciate that you took an extra measure of care and concern for their development and their understanding of the great importance of the "joy of learning" when you said 'no' to the politicians, the educrats and the billionaires by sparing them the oppression of the very flawed CSAP.

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In today's Denver Post is an article by Bill Gates agitating for even more taxpayer's money and for even more government effort to be funneled into the failing status quo education plan that he supports.

Take a look at the Gates' exhortation for more of the same ... then my response:

Identifying Smarter School Reform | Bill Gates/Washington Post/Denver Post

Here's what billionaire computer salesman Bill Gates is really saying in his article: 1) we need more bureaucracy in public education; 2) we should increase class size; 3) don't count on most teachers being able to teach; 4) he admits that the "reform" policy we've been following for the past fifteen years is still failing.

First, Gates repeatedly talks about "measuring" and "metrics" ... what you would expect from a computer software salesman. Millions and millions of dollars are already being siphoned away from actual teaching time into testing and tracking and interpreting and evaluating -- data analysis -- all activities that depend upon computing power. For instance, Colorado is spending $17.4 million for a student data tracking system ... mean while because of the state government's budget crisis untold numbers of teachers will be laid-off. What a deal, the likes of Bill Gates get richer, we get mega-googleplexes of 'data', and fewer teachers to actually teach -- what kind of education policy is that?

Understand that all this emphasis on "measuring" means more administrative bureaucracy and less time and resources for teaching kids.

Second, in the last third of his essay Gates says that we need to find and/or build the "Superman" teacher and let her/him teach all the kids. Thirty or thirty-five kids in an eighth grade pre-algebra class? Hey, no problem for "Superman Teacher!"

Thirdly, maybe in the world of billionaire wizards and corporate educrats this kind of thinking is thought of as 'innovative'. In the real world we know that it is folly to be 'waiting for Superman teacher' ... while at the same time whining that teachers get paid too much already and charging that when teachers bargain collectively they become 'freeloaders' on the taxpayers. Let's see how this works out in attracting the best and brightest into the teaching profession; besides, any working class American over the age of thirty knows that in the real world "superman" who works cheap and can solve all our problems doesn't exist -- most teachers are regular folks doing their best and giving their all, as imperfect as they are (like all the rest of us).

Finally, let's remember that we started this "reform" plan that Gates espouses, the "accountability" and CSAP testing plan when Roy Romer was governor -- a good fifteen or more years ago. It went national a decade ago with Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' and it's been pumped-up even more with Obama's 'Race to the Top'. This so-called "reform" is the education status quo ... and Gate's himself admits that even after spending all this time and money on his version of "reform" that "our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries" and that "America has spent more and achieved less."

In other words, the plan/philosophy Gates is still promoting is a failure when it comes to educating our kids -- but it has been a windfall for corporations that make money off education and it has resulted in a successful power grab for Washington, D.C. educrats who want to control a nationalized, top-down bureaucracy.

In Colorado, let's hope that our education budget crisis can be used as an opportunity to tell Gates and his minions to take a hike and let us educate our kids the way we want them taught -- by schools we run, by teachers and parents who are directly invested in their own child's learning.