Accountability & PISA

“In failing to provide a concrete definition of the terms "religion" and "secular," the courts are free to conclude that in public schools a person may not teach evidence substantiating the traditionally religious view of a Supreme Creator, but one may teach a world-view that excludes the existence of a Supreme Creator or an after-life.” (Fuller, 1994, p. 114)

“A definition too broad excludes much of what is necessary to a viable society and leads to anarchy; a definition too narrow constrains the conscience of one person while establishing the religion of another.”(Fuller, 1994, p. 87)

In effect, Jefferson sought to resolve the problem through eradicating the divisiveness of the sects by distilling them to their essence. (Fuller, 1994, 92)

“Jefferson reasoned that "[b]y bringing the sects together, and mixing them with the mass of other students, we shall soften their asperities, liberalize and neutralize their prejudices and make the general religion a religion of peace, reason, and moral” (Fuller, 1994, p. 92)

“public educational system was seen as a way to instill and develop those characteristics necessary to perpetuate and advance a democratic society.” (Fuller, 1994, p. 89)

This suggestion and quote goes to show that from the beginning there was little to no separation between government and religion, making it hard now to justify the separation between religion and education. By looking back on the men who built our country, time and time again we see that their views and ideas are backed by a religious power

“The Court states that graduation is "one of life's most significant occasions"108 and that the students are susceptible to the psychological coercion inherent in maintaining respectful silence. Yet, the Court, apparently, believes that proscribing prayer at a graduation ceremony does not send a message to these students that creeds which engage in prayer are not to be tolerated.” (Fuller, 1994, p. 105-106)

“In Lee v. Weisman105 the Court held that graduation prayers directed by state officials violated the Establishment Clause. The majority found that the government involvement in religion was pervasive and that the students were forced to submit to subtle coercive pressure. 106 The Court displayed the type of thinking which leads one to believe that the Court either draws its definition of religion too narrowly or fails to define religion at all.” (Fuller, 1994, p. 105

Personally, this definition of religion is to vague to be expected to follow. Some people may say that a theory of evolution or how the world was created is religion because there is no definitive proof of any theory. It is a belief based on evidence that people choose to believe, just like religions such as Christianity. There cannot be a huge emphasis on the separation between religion and science when religion cannot be properly defined.

“The question remains, why does modern society interpret the Establishment Clause to require absolute separation of religion and the classroom? While analyzing modern thought as reflected in case law, one must look beyond the Establishment Clause application to the Establishment Clause interpretation and how and why that differs with historical perspectives.” (Fuller, 1994, p. 109)

“Historical references provide evidences that the Establishment Clause has not been interpreted to preclude religion from all aspects of public life. For example, in Bradfield v. Roberts122 the Supreme Court held that a federal government contract with the Catholic Sisters of Charity to run a hospital did not violate the Establishment Clause.” (Fuller, 1994, p. 108)

The Sixth Circuit rejected the district court’s suggestion that the school district should balance the “offensive” material with material which correlates with the parents’ views. (Fuller, 1994, 100)

“The Carnegie group in 1906 proposed that each course be taught in periods of 50 minutes per day every day for 32 weeks”

“After much research and deliberation, the committee recommended that school districts be formed entirely along county lines”

“the development and acceptance of a standard, bureaucratized system of age-graded schools was not itself invented by a central committee that bent its mind to the task”

“Age grading required regular attendance, and its logical culmination was high school. Ungraded one-room schools were cheaper not just because the teacher and building were less expensive, but because students could take as much or as little as they wanted of what the school had to offer”

“district consolidations in the last forty years of the twentieth century continued to occur almost entirely in rural areas”

“Factors that accounted for the decline in one-room schools included the steady trend in urbanization and the concomitant decline in farming”

“The modern system swamped the local economies of the age-graded classroom by dramatically increasing the amount of schooling that students were required to have”

“Not only did the number of farms decline, but the average size of farms rose steadily after 1870.1 Rural birth rates, like those in cities, declined throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, although rural rates have always been above urban rates." These trends were, in turn, the result of mechanization of farm work, which made large farms viable and reduced the demand for child labor”

“The eight years of elementary school and four of high school did not become a national norm until the twentieth century”

“All of the teachers in a multigrade school had to agree to the curriculum in each grade. The sole teacher in a one-room school could teach skills and subjects in just about any order that she pleased. In most cases, teachers just followed textbook order, but they could select which textbook subjects would be studied”

“One-room schools could not do age-graded education very well. Teachers with students in each of eight grades simply did not have time to give a separate recitation lesson in their individual grades. A teacher with students in each cohort would have to cover on average six subjects in each grade. That would be forty-eight separate recitations per five-hour day, or six minutes per lesson.3 In theory, students would be in "study hall" for seven-eighths of the school day”

“Cities had sufficient population density to enable a large number of children to be assembled in a single school building and divided by age group into classrooms of homogenous age groups”

“Public high schools of the latter quarter of the nineteenth century transformed themselves to be able to produce graduates with these skills. In doing so, they put most of the private academies out of business, often taking over their former buildings”

“Consolidation was locally desired by a majority of voters because it plugged them into what was developing as a national system of age-graded schools that led to high school”

“ District consolidation required in most cases the consent of the local voters, and they had to be persuaded that consolidated, age-graded schools were desirable”

“the quality of the school depended almost exclusively on the quality of the instructor”

“Having a school that attracted buyers to the district as a whole would be capitalized into the value of all properties in the district, not just those close to the school”

“ Superintendents, principals, and much of the teaching staff could stay long enough to establish a reputation. The lack of a consolidated, age graded system put local property owners at a disadvantage when it came to selling their homes and farms to people with children”

Trying to create it so that students are their own citizen and use their experiences in different ways

"An autonomy-facilitating education involves encountering the ideas, attitudes, and theories of different cultures. To make informed decisions concerning how one is to live the good life, this engagement is of critical importance" (Murray, 2009, p. 50).

"Secession also occurs and reshapes the political and social landscape for all involved-albeit with negligible fanfare" (Murray, 2009, p. 48).

"One disturbing pattern is reflected in the demographics of the groups that attempt school district secession. In the overwhelming majority of attempts at redrawing the boundaries of school districts, its advocates are mainly caucasian, fairly to very affluent, and currently joined in the same school district with a community of a racial or ethnic minority" (Murray, 2009, p. 51).

“Just as in the case of the imminent shattering of the Soviet Union, when many distinct groups anticipated the opportunity for sovereignty and mobilized for self-determination, many distinct communities throughout LAUSD began clamoring for their own districts as initial discussions of secession intensified” (Murray, 2009, p 52).

o “A general, but quite predictable, result can arise from this mechanism for school funding – affluent communities have a more solvent tax base, yet tend to tax themselves at a much lower rate than their less well-to-do counterparts in order to fund their respective schools.” (Murray, D. 2009, p.48)

“Secession involves a pair of conditions:1) it is the redrawing of political boundaries in such a way as to allow for a change in jurisdiction over a territory and 2) the new political unit takes territory with it. School district secession meets both of these requirements in the most basic sense” (Murray, 2009, p 53).

“As the school population increases, teacher to pupil ratios decrease and other indicators of decline in the quality of local education emerge, affluent parents investigate other means of educating their children.” (Murray, D. 2009, p.49)

"citizens have the privilege of educating their children in the private domain, doesn’t mean they release themselves from the obligation of paying their share in the public system” (Murray, 2009, p 56).

“Presumably, we are concerned that each of us, within a modern democratic society, has equality of opportunity. If this is true, then we should worry whether some children are unfairly advantaged over others in acquiring the skills necessary for equal opportunity.” (Murray, D. 2009, p.49)

“Friedman consistently emphasized that vouchers would promote a free society, produce competition, and improve schooling, though he always supported public financing because of the vital role schools play in instilling the common values and literacy skills needed to sustain a democracy.” (Minow, 2011, p. 822)

“In this extreme instance, most of the county's 1700 black children had no educational opportunities for five years, although neighboring Norfolk Catholic High School integrated voluntarily.” (Minow, 2011, p. 823)

“This marked only one of many times when private schools became associated with resistance to desegregation.” (Minow, 2011, p.823)

“Plans ostensibly allowing students to transfer across "public schools" — introducing the phrase to educational policy—did the same, but produced essentially no movement between historically black and historically white schools.” (Minow, 2011, p.821)

“White Southerners did, in fact, use school choice practices as a form of resistance to court-ordered desegregation. They also created organizations across the South to fight the implementation of Brown and effectively threatened retaliation against anyone who advocated integration." (Minow, 2011, p.822)

“Collectively, we all would be better off if we challenged individual schools and school systems to do better—to address the tensions between accommodating differences and offering a sense of belonging, as well as the tensions between validating subgroups and forging a common world.” (Minow, 2011, p. 848)

“By now, school choice has altered the landscape of American schooling by dislodging the assumption that most students simply attend the school assigned by the local district. But the borders of districts — separating suburbs and cities, middle-class and poor—remain intact, preserving high-quality suburban public schools for those who can afford the real estate” (Minow, 2010, p. 843).

“When designed well, choice initiatives open new possibilities not only for appreciating differences on a societal level but also for drawing together students from different backgrounds. Even schools focused on particular identity-linked traits can promote mixing different kinds of students if the individual schools are developed to have broad appeal and if student assignment policies can take diversity into account. School systems, local communities, states, and the federal government can establish regulatory frameworks with more or less encouragement for special-identity schools” (Minow, 2010, p. 844).

Our laws have made school choice a force, thus influencing the worlds of families, nations, cultures, religions, genders, sexualities, disabilities, and even the narratives we tell about what we want for the next generation. (Minow, 2011, p. 847)

: “Public schooling is financed by taxpayers, and private schooling is financed by parental user fees and philanthropy (with only the small public subsidy accorded through tax-exempt status for religious and independent schools).” (Minow, 2011, p. 820)

But the decision also produced a system in which only public schools received public funding, leaving parental choice of private schooling to private philanthropy and families vdth economic resources. (Minow, 2011, p. 819-820)

“School choice initiatives took the forms of vouchers and magnet schools during the 1970s and 1980s and reflected designs to open up better educational options for students confined to failing inner-city public schools” (Minow, 2010, p. 825),

“Yet magnet schools have also created new difficulties. As a device to promote racial balance in previously segregated or racially isolated schools, magnet programs sometimes produce diverse enrollments while reducing diversity in the nonmagnet schools” (Minow, 2010, p. 826).

The magnet programs may attract resources to the frustration of neighborhood schools. In addition, they may seem too expensive to offer a feasible model for other schools or beyond the remedial power of a desegregation court. (Minow, 2011, p. 826)

: “And even though the Supreme Court has permitted colleges and graduate schools to include race as a plus-factor when engaging in individualized assessment of candidates in higher education admissions, the Court in the recent Seattle and Louisville schools cases sharply curbed the use of racial categories even when intended to promote racial integration in public elementary, middle, and high schools.” (Minow, 2011, p. 827

As public school systems increasingly offer parents and students a range of educational choices, individuals may be able to enroll in more appealing schools. (Minow, 2011, p. 833)

“The very framework of choice pushes the character of emerging schools off the screen of public discussion and treats the question as one of private consumption rather than collective character. Schools specialized by student identity can have strengths and drawbacks, and the decision about how much education should tilt in their direction deserves collective, not merely private, family choice.” (Minow, 2011, p. 842)

o The current possibility of school choice authorizes development of schools that attract population subgroups, inviting self-segregation by religion, ethnicity, language, and disability (Minow, 2011, p. 835).

“The challenge of changing the opportunities for the most disadvantaged children, Canada suggests, seems to require changing everything affecting their lives, even though his efforts take for granted their isolation from people of other races and socioeconomic classes.” (Minow, 2011, p. 842)

Charter schools and other school choice options could promote racial and ethnic integration if students of all backgrounds are recruited and their choices are given effect. (Minow, 2011, p. 837)

The inter-group conflicts of individual choice veiled the conflicts between the groups

“By 2008, public vouchers to support private schooling receded from the public stage, leaving entrepreneurial school reformers engaged with charter, magnet, and pilot schools, as well as other forms of school choice, within public school systems.” (Minow, 2011, p. 832)

“Third, school vouchers risk pressuring students to attend schools not of their own religion and pressuring religious schools to modify their practices to suit the government funder” (Minow, 2010, p. 832).

“First, publicly funded school vouchers risk perpetuating unequal educational opportunities for poor students of color because they and their parents may not be able to take advantage of the private school options, as good options remain relatively scarce; "school choice" will allow schools to pick students as well as parents to pick schools —and parents with financial means or savvy will likely benefit most” (Minow, 2010, p. 832).

“Fourth, school voucher programs offer the illusion of choice but in fact remain confined to district lines —stopping at the border of suburbs where strong public and private school options remain off-limits to poor urban students” (Minow, 2010, p, 832).

"Pierce illustrates the pattern of constitutional challenge to policies framed in universal terms but having the effect or underlying purpose of excluding or subordinating members of minority groups.” (Minow, 2010, p. 820)

In the second, the rise of private school options and "freedom of choice" plans used by whites to bypass court ordered racial desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s associated school choice with self-segregation by whites" (Minow, 2010, p. 818).

“In the fourth moment, longstanding constitutional campaigns to enable publicly financed vouchers to pay for religious schooling reached fruition in 2002” (Minow, 2010, p. 818).

“The first moment introduced the discourse of school choice with the fight over Americanization during the 1920s.

“In the third moment, federal courts and local school systems turned to magnet schools and other forms of public-school choice in pursuit of voluntary dimensions of racial desegregation from the 1970s until the Supreme Court curbed such efforts” (Minow, 2010, p. 818).

“And, finally, during the early decades of this new century, proliferating experiments with charter schools, magnet schools, and other forms of choice present occasions for local, state, and national debate over whether to renew commitments to integration within schools across lines of race, religion, class, and other student differences or to promote plural kinds of schools that enable variety and competition as well as permit increasing separation of different kinds of students into different school” (Minow, 2010, p. 818).

“Pierce v. Society of Sisters as a key precedent for religious freedom, parental rights, fundamental privacy, and a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. Justice McReynolds's memorable sentences are frequently quoted from the case: "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."" The decision accorded enduring constitutional protection to parental choice of parochial and other private schooling.” (Minow, 2011, p.819)

Choice For religious Freedom

Early 20th Century immigration boom worried some folks... so they wanted to make sure these new immigrants were Americanized property, so they pushed for compulsory schooling in public schools.

“Like the GED, PISA was created by a relatively small nongovernmental organization— the OECD—that sought to provide with its test a universal measure of high school quality. The authors of PISA, as with the GED, achieved this universality—this contextless quality—by abstracting from the actual curricular of individual schools, states, and countries. While the GED claimed to measure the “ultimate outcomes of a high school education” those concepts with the “greatest functional value”” (Hutt, 2014 pg.14)

“In many cases, tests, and the standards they are designed to reflect, fail to meet these requirements, and thus the test results cease to be a successful formalism. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how a contextless measure like the GED or PISA could ever fulfill Stinchcombe’s criteria.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.16)

““educational policy has further been affected by the development of the General Educational Development Tests, which have provided a means for substituting measured achievement for credit hours or units measured by the clock and the calendar”” (Hutt, 2014 pg.12)

“The more widely used the GED became and the more people used the GED to join the ranks of high school graduates, the more the idea of the high school graduate became intertwined with the GED itself.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.13)

“The belief that a standardized test would be the solution to the problem posed by demobilization along with the decision to tap a scholar like Lindquist to solve it reflected both the considerable faith of psychometricians in the power of educational testing but also of the considerable prestige that the field of educational measurement had achieved by the end of the war.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.6)

“techniques used by the GED creators, had produced a nationally normed, standardized test that represented not just an equivalent measure of high school but a superior measure as well.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.10)

“They believed that academic content knowledge could be so sufficiently separated from the lasting outcomes of a high school education that Lindquist and his colleagues expressly designed the test to prevent strong correlations between subject achievement tests and the GED.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.8)

“Understanding this aspect of the GED’s history is a crucial part of understanding how new school measures like PISA, which rest on similar claims of context-free assessment, have the potential to transform the idea of school even as they measure it.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.3)

“GED and PISA are different in many significant ways, their origins and use include several important parallels that suggest a consideration of the history of the GED could be instructive to those considering the future of global accountability.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.3)

“The standards movement continued in the United States over the next two decades, making progress at the state level but never quite being able to bring about a strong national mandate. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton tried to establish national educational goals, but these died in the face of resistance from states that feared loss of control over education, traditionally lodged at the state level” (Labaree, 2014, pg. 7).

Both claim that their measures provide policy makers with useful information for schools who want to effectively produce human capital.

“Second, within the narrow bounds of the formal school curriculum, PISA and NCLB insist on tightening the focus further to a subset of this curriculum that they consider of most importance. Look at the three areas that PISA tests: literacy, science, and math. These three school subjects are also the focus of NCLB, with the addition of a small piece of social studies in some states. Largely missing are history and social studies” (Labaree, 2014, pg. 11).

PISA was faced with enormous variation in curriculum across the countries studied and had no authority to impose a standard curriculum

“PISA emerged from a series of other international efforts to assess school achievement that arose after the Second World War. The main precursor organization was the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), an offshoot of UNESCO, which conducted a 12-country pilot study in 1959, followed by the First International Mathematics Study in 1964, the First International Science Study in 1971, the second version of each of these studies in 1982 and 1984, and the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1995 (IEA, n.d.)” (Labaree, 2014, pg. 3).

“Instead they had to come up with another approach. They also had to deal with the incompatibility of school structures across countries, where the length of compulsory schooling varies and so does the meaning of being in a particular grade level in the system. They came up with ingenious responses to these two comparison problems” (Labaree, 2014, pg. 4).

“So how did the test makers construct PISA? As with any international comparison, of course, their core problem was the incompatibility of curricula across countries. So one thing was clear from the outset: They could not measure how well students around the world were learning the subjects that these students were actually being taught in school” (Labaree, 2014, pg. 4).

2. This makes sense because both tests were created to measure something that cannot be measured. The GED and PISA tried to create a test that could “rule them all”. This created a lack of accountability and proper regulations.

3. I believe this because this is the facts about NCLB and PISA. NCLB focuses on standards and meeting certain criteria whereas PISA created something that is intangible

3. This makes sense because legislators realized the issues in education and designed a program that would overcome these issues. NCLB was especially proficient in the areas where PISA and the GEDs fell behind.

2. This makes sense because I have seen this segregation in schools in my area. Similar people attend similar schools, especially when they have the choice to do so.

1. “PISA emerged from a series of other international efforts to assess school achievement that arose after the Second World War.” (Labaree, 2014, pg.3)

1.“PISA is based on a dynamic model of lifelong learning in which new knowledge and skills necessary for successful adaptation to a changing world are continuously acquired throughout life. PISA focuses on things that 15-year-olds will need in their future lives and seeks to assess what they can do with what they have learned. The assessment is informed—but not constrained—by the common denominator of national curricula. PISA does assess students’ knowledge, but it also examines their ability to reflect on the knowledge and experience, and to apply that knowledge and experience to real world issues.” (Labaree, 2014, pg.4)

1. “effort to narrow the curriculum to the four traditional academic subjects (math, science, English, and social studies); to set standards for performance in each of these areas for students at different levels of the system; and to hold students and schools accountable for attaining these standards through high-stakes tests.” (Labaree, 2014, pg.6)

1. “Both PISA and NCLB represent radically reductionist visions of education. They both reduce education to learning; and they both reduce learning to the small subset of knowledge and skill that is seen to be economically relevant. In the end, they both conceive of education simply as the efficient production of economically useful skills.” (Labaree, 2014, pg.10)

1. “If we are going to understand the meaning of the new accountability regime in education, as represented by PISA and NCLB, we need to understand the particulars of how it defines and measures educational quality. Everything depends on how you define a good school and on what evidence would be needed to persuade you that a particular school or school system is good or bad.” (Labaree, 2014, pg.13)

1. “The limited prior academic achievement posed a serious problem to those who viewed postsecondary education as the primary mechanism for reintegrating veterans, because a high school diploma was increasingly necessary not only for college enrollment but for licensure in a growing number of occupations” (Hutt, 2014 pg.4)

1. “As Lindquist explained in his definitive statement on the philosophy and approach of the Tests of General Educational Development (GED), the GED was “designed especially to provide a measure of a general educational development which results from . . . all of the possibilities for informal self-education which military service involves, as well as the general educational growth incidental to military training an experience as such”” (Hutt, 2014 pg.6)

1.“Distilling the entirety of a high school education into a single test battery, the results of which could secure a high school equivalency diploma for the test taker, ultimately required Lindquist to decide what elements were at the core of a high school education.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.7)

1. “That the GED would long outlive its initial purpose is a testament to the rhetorical power and political usefulness of the kind of contextless assessment that the GED represented.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.11)

1.“The GED had become the educational equivalent of nylon—a synthetic wartime substitute turned mainstream product.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.13)

(Hutt, 2014 pg.15)
1.“The GED, after all, was tied up in the issuing of a specific credential and was, theoretically at least, pegged to the American high school diploma. PISA, on the other hand, remains a measure of the OECD’s best guess about the skills that will make the average global citizen successful in her future career.” (Hutt, 2014 pg.15)

3. I believe this because many students do not have the slightest idea of education that goes beyond test taking. Because of this system students don't know information, they simply have it memorized. Their lack of realization that they actually do not understand material is only found once they are thrown into the real world.

4. This section made me think about the benefits of NCLB as well as the repercussions that come as a results of more "fair" and even standards.

5. This item was dissatisfying because it paints NCLB in the same light as PISA. In my conceptual ecology, these two platforms couldn't be farther apart.

4.&5. The general idea behind this article changed my conceptual ecology. I never realized before the impact school choice has on our society. It is also conflicting in my conceptual ecology because on one hand I think that everyone should be able to choose where their kids go to school so that they know what their kids are learning. On the other hand, I think that school choice could be part of the cause for segregation and could be making students more closed minded to those who are different from themselves.

4. I do not think that eliminating school choice would solve segregation, it would only cause more of a rift. This section made me think about how the issues of school choice could be solved without eliminating school choice itself.

3. I agree with this because I can see where the use of school vouchers for this instance would cause problems.

3. I believe this because it is history. Religion was the primary source for information when the education system in America was founded.

2. This makes sense because there is no other way to define what is "religious" natters vs what is not unless you are using religion as your primary source.

5. I do not think that teachers should be allowed to brainwash their students with religion but I do not think teachers should be allowed to brainwash with any philosophy or teaching. If a teacher is allowed to talk about other controversial topics, why should he then be persecuted for talking about religion?

2.3.4.5.? This article states multiple times that religion cannot be defined. That is basically the argument against religion in schools. But this makes no sense because, in all reality, everything that ever was cannot be "defined". We, as a society, have simply put labels on things and conformed them to how we want them to be. Religion goes beyond our box of classification to something we cannot understand so we disregard it and say it cannot be "defined." Therefore, we have slowly eliminated religion from our education system.

4. I experienced this compromise in my art history class. every religion was discussed equally but without any propaganda.

3. This makes sense because farmers were directly impacted by property value.

5. How can these systems be successful if they were unwilling to accept standardized systems and did not want them?

2.4. I've never thought about education as being related to the decline in farming population but this fact makes perfect sense.

2. This makes sense. Obviously students saw the entrance exam as daunting so they did not even want to take it.

2.5. This makes sense because these school systems were still teaching students something but the test results they were getting did not look good. As Albert Einstein said "If you judge a fish by it's ability to climb a tree, it will look dumb"... or something like that. My point is, the students that were doing bad on the exam probably were going to become farmers themselves anyway. So their abilities a may not have allowed them to take a test but that did not mean that they were dumb. On the other hand, having a minimum standard of "testing knowledge" should be acquired in elementary and high school.

2. This makes sense to me. An education system has to adjust to those who it is educating.

5. I am confused about one-room schools? What are they and why were they used in rural settings?

3. I believe this because students must have an understanding about the world around them so that they are able to contribute to society, but what they learn and how "standardized" it is should not be determined for every student across the board.

2. I agree with this item. We must not forget , in our many issues in education, that the main goal is to allow students to learn and instill information in them despite our controversies.