Tag: Senator Teresa Ruiz

Just Vote No

Tomorrow, the NJ State Assembly is scheduled to vote on Assembly Bill No. 4957. Its synopsis says that it “Revises provisions of law concerning graduation proficiency test and eliminates requirement that graduation proficiency test be administered in eleventh grade.”

In point of fact, however, the bill does far more than that.

In Section 1(a), it allows New Jersey’s current requirement for a single high school proficiency test — singular, not plural — to be replaced by “a Statewide assessment or assessments” — note that final “s” in assessments. What that little letter means is that to graduate, all students can be required to take as many assessments — i.e., testS — as any particular governor’s State Board of Education feels like throwing at them. In theory, there is nothing in this bill that could stop a State Board of Education from requiring 180 assessmentS per year. So on Monday your kid could need to “prove” that he can correctly use a semicolon; on Wednesday your kid could need to “prove” that she can solve simple quadratic equations; on Friday your kid could need to “prove” that they can pass a multi-choice test on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Under Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Lampitt’s bill, the sky’s the limit.

The bill also gets rid of the prior requirement that this test be given in 11th grade. Now the test or tests can be given in as many grades as our legislators care to designate. Heck, let’s start high school exit exams for kindergarteners! I mean, after all, this bill is so vague that it literally appears to give our State Board of Education the power to do that. In all seriousness, this could require an unlimited number of tests in 9th grade, in 10th grade, in 11th grade…. the sky’s the limit (see below for a discussion of what this is likely to mean in practice).

But wait! There’s more… In Section 6, this bill allows the current requirement that the high school exit exam test “measure those basic skills all students must possess to function politically, economically and socially in a democratic society” (see N.J.S.A. Section 18:7C-6.1) to be morphed into a requirement that the assessment or assessments be “designed to test high school proficiency.” Yes, in one fell swoop this bill would also move us from a basic skills test intended to ensure that all high school students have minimum basic skills in “reading, writing and computational skills” (see N.J.S.A. 18:7C-1) — historically, this was implemented to put an end to horrible stories about young people graduating from high school without knowing how to read — to some unspecified and arbitrary level of high school “proficiency” that would require our engineers to be equally proficient as our poets to be equally as proficient as our cabinetmakers or glass blowers.

What seems clear here is that someone — likely someone with a large investment in education technology/software companies who is also whispering in Senator Ruiz’s ear — wants this legislation to pass, and to pass NOW.

These days so-called “personalized learning,” generally means, in practice, students passing computerized test after computerized test to “prove” that they’ve achieved a whole bunch of arbitrary “skills” as measured by those computer-based tests. See, for example, Peter Greene’s excellent discussion, here, in which he explains that personalized learning is really just personalized pacing, and that this is not a new concept, especially for those of us of a certain age who remember those rainbow-colored SRA boxes full of reading passages that we worked more or less diligently in our elementary school classrooms. Further, Maine recently piloted just such an approach, which was an epic disaster that went down in flames. See this article about the mess. Or this one. Or this one. Or maybe this one. In effect, what software companies are trying to make happen through their political stooges like Senator Ruiz is to make reality out of Isaac Asimov’s cautionary 1951 science fiction story, The Fun They Had. (Seriously, click the link and read the story — it’s amazing how prescient he was 68 years ago.)

What is terrifying about Senator Ruiz’s bill is that it creates the legislative scaffolding that could be used to set up a scheme where students have to pass five, ten, or even fifty or a hundred separate “mini-assessments” of “high school proficiency” skills to obtain a New Jersey high school diploma.

Education Law Center and the New Jersey Department of Education have already ensured that the classes of 2019 and 2020 are set to graduate under the current high school exit exam law (remember, only 12 states have a law of this sort of all, so perhaps we should take a pause to consider the consequences of keeping such a law in place). What’s more is that they’ve given us two years of breathing room to ensure that we can come up with sensible and well thought through options for subsequent class years. Senator Ruiz, however, is trying to do an end-run around that compromise by pushing Assembly Speaker Coughlin to list this poorly-thought through and poorly-vetted bill for a vote tomorrow.

If you live in New Jersey, call, email, instagram, Facebook message, and Tweet your Assembly Members now. Leave voicemails. Urge them to vote no. Remind them that they’re up for election this November and that you will remember in November.

Look up your legislators HERE.

Technology has its place in public education (I’m sure glad I can use a calculator rather than a slide rule, and some software is great for things like memorizing math facts). But folks like Senator Ruiz are rushing through this legislation out of a misguided belief that technology trumps teachers, that standardized tests are magic tools of learning, and that human relationships are irrelevant to student success.

If this bill by some miracle does not pass tomorrow, then I urge you to buy your legislators Harvard professor Daniel Koretz’s book The Testing Charade. (If the bill fails I will go ahead and spring to send a copy to Senator Ruiz although I will wait for the paperback to be released on March 8th.) Koretz conclusively demonstrates that our kids deserve so much better than yet another testing mess, which is all that this bill, if passed, would bring us.

Do yourself — and your kids — a favor. Urge your legislators to vote no.

Behind Closed Doors

In her opening remarks this morning at a hastily convened Joint Senate & Assembly Education Committee hearing, New Jersey State Senator M. Teresa Ruiz (D-29) announced her position that the decision regarding how to handle the state’s move away from the bungled PARCC assessment should be made “behind closed doors.”

She. Really. Said. That.

Behind closed doors.

She wants to throw our kids under the bus behind closed doors.

In secret.

Privately.

So that there will be nothing you or I can do until it’s too late.

Apparently Senator Ruiz, a George Norcross-Steve Sweeney aligned Democrat-in-Name-Only, is no longer going to hide her Trump-like inclination to govern secretly. By fiat. This is Democracy, 2018-style: policy that affects your kids and mine should be made behind closed doors.

It seems clear that Senator Ruiz wants deals to be made behind closed doors so that the parents, teachers, and community members with whom she disagrees can be shut out of the process. She literally wants to slam the door in our faces, just as her allies in the Christie administration did for eight years. Little wonder, I suppose…given that she seems to be the last cheerleader standing for the PARCC assessments.

So, let’s rewind.

Who is Senator Ruiz hiding from?

  • Is she hiding from the approximately 100 parents, students, teachers, school board members, and other New Jersey citizens who testified on January 7, 2015 regarding the mess PARCC created in our schools?
  • Is she hiding from the hundreds of parents, educators, students, and community leaders who spoke before the Governor’s PARCC study commission in the winter of 2015? With the lone exception of the NJPTA, which coincidentally accepted a large grant from the pro-PARCC Gates Foundation, the hundreds of testimonies before that commission universally opposed PARCC. (Nevertheless, the Commission’s final report completely ignored their perspective.)
  • Is she hiding from the standing room only crowd that testified in February 2015 at the Assembly Education Committee in support of two PARCC opt-out bills that she later refused to allow to be heard before her Senate Education Committee?
  • Is she hiding from the full-house crowd that attended a May 18, 2015 Senate Education Committee hearing that she finally scheduled to consider some watered-down PARCC bills?
  • Is she hiding from the parents and educators who took the time in the fall of 2015 to attend the bogus “Listening Tour” sessions organized around Chris Christie’s cynical presidential-run inspired renaming of the Common Core standards?
  • Is she hiding from the parents and educators who took the time — in May 2016, in June 2016, and again in the fall of 2016 — to travel to the State Board of Education to oppose the asinine regulations that will — if left unchanged — make PARCC ELA-10 and PARCC Algebra I the only paths to graduation for hundreds of thousands of New Jersey students starting with this year’s high school sophomores?
  • Is she hiding from the parents and educators who turned out — again and again — at every step along the way to oppose expanding New Jersey’s standardized testing mandates as well as the graduation requirements built (as even she agrees) in violation of the clear language of the state statute around those expanded testing schemes?
  • Is she hiding from the parents, students, and educators who finally showed up in April 2017 at Senate President Sweeney’s office to demand that he direct Senator Ruiz to do her job and post SCR132 for a vote? (If Senator Ruiz had ever been willing to allow her committee to consider it, this resolution would have declared the PARCC graduation requirement regulations inconsistent with the authorizing legislation as PARCC calls for use of Algebra I and ELA 10 tests, but the graduation requirement statute requires an 11th grade test. Even Senator Ruiz, in an April 2017 letter, agreed that the regulations should be amended to make them comply with the graduation statute.)
  • Is she hiding from the over 2,000 New Jersey parents, teachers, students, and concerned citizens mobilized by a Save Our Schools New Jersey action alert who sent emails to the New Jersey Board of Education supporting the new regulations last week before the vote on the regulations was tabled?
  • Is she hiding from the annoyed, angry, frustrated, and sad parents, educators, and students who have become cynical as can be about government precisely because of her obstructionism and the obstructionism and lack of open communication of those like her?

Why, exactly, does Senator Ruiz think she needs to hide behind closed doors? Is it because she can no longer hide behind Chris Christie?

All Commissioner Repollet’s revised PARCC graduation regulations really do is to effectively maintain the status quo for graduation exit exams — i.e., they provide our young people in the class of 2021 and beyond with the option to rely on the current smorgasbord of standardized test options (SAT, ACT, ASVAB, Accuplacer, etc.) to satisfy the state graduation testing requirement available to the class of 2019. The only other real change they make is that they seek to eliminate the wasteful additional high school PARCC exams (those for ELA 9 and 11 as well as those for Geometry and Algebra II) given that much of that material is assessed on the current smorgasbord of optional tests.

Senator Ruiz objects to this approach for two reasons. First, she argues that some high school kids don’t take APs and college entrance exams, and she thinks those high school kids should be tested a lot too (PARCC Algebra I and PARCC ELA 10 apparently aren’t enough for her). What is missing from the Senator’s analysis, however, is how more time prepping for additional tests is going to help those kids become better readers, writers, thinkers, and speakers. What I am left to wonder is whether Senator Ruiz wants to keep high school kids so busy preparing for and taking successive PARCC tests that they won’t have time to question why legislators like her think that governing should take place behind closed doors.

Second, Senator Ruiz and her even more clueless sidekick Assemblywoman Lampitt argue that changing the current regulations would create additional chaos in New Jersey’s public schools. But what Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt fail to consider is that it is the current regulations — with their upcoming PARCC or bust trigger for the class of 2021 and beyond — are what are poised to create chaos of epic proportions among New Jersey’s public school students. As of now, only 29% of New Jersey students are positioned to graduate using only PARCC (as opposed to using PARCC plus the smorgasbord of additional options). If these regulations are indefinitely tabled as Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Lampitt demand, I look forward to watching them face hordes of angry new 18 year old voters who are not going to be granted high school diplomas in 2021… right when both of them will be seeking reelection.

Unlike Senator Ruiz and Assemblywoman Lampitt, who spent today’s hearing grandstanding, Governor Phil Murphy’s appointee, Commissioner Repollet, actually has New Jersey’s students’ best interests at heart. Commissioner Repollet’s interim regulations are meant to give us some breathing space while the Department of Education — and not career politicians — engages in thoughtful vetting of new assessment options. The Commissioner’s make-haste-slowly approach (as exasperating as it is to parents like me, who want to throw tantrums and demand that PARCC be eliminated NOW) will allow New Jersey’s current sophomores and below to step away from the precipice on which the current regulations have placed them, and puts New Jersey’s students before loyalty to the testing companies. New Jersey’s students would be far better served if Senator Ruiz backed off from her fact-devoid, Trump-style hissy fit and actually demonstrated some of the critical thinking skills she claims PARCC can assess. But sadly, that is far too much to ask of machine-controlled politicians like Senator Ruiz.