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Information about The College
Board and SpringBoard Curriculum that Gilbert Public
Schools Administrators Withheld from the Board and the
Public
At the June 5, 2012 Governing Board
meeting, the GPS administration presented a one-sided case for
adopting the SpringBoard English Language Arts curriculum, over
protests of parents and teachers. SpringBoard is a product of
the College Board, the company known for the SAT test and Advanced
Placement courses and tests.
As reported in the Arizona Republic:
Board member Blake Sacha said
this was the hardest decision he's had to make as a new school
board member. He said his son also struggled with SpringBoard
the past year. "I do believe we have to do something
different, and I also believe it's the board's responsibility to
trust the experts," Sacha said.
NEWSFLASH for Blake Sacha
and taxpayers: Experts within and outside Gilbert
Public Schools say that SpringBoard is inadequate as a
curriculum, not right for GPS students, and this initial
adoption is merely a Trojan Horse for future spending
obligations.
More from Hayley Ringle's article:
Rachel Stafford, a
Mesquite High School teacher who was passing along information
from other teachers, said although the planning has been cut
down "drastically," the "step-by-step process feels stifling"
and "insulting" to some teachers. "They do not see remediation
techniques possible," Stafford said. "Some lessons may not work
in Gilbert."
Anderson requested the board table a vote and have
administrators come back with a "better solution." "I feel
so much frustration and have heard from ninth-grade teachers who
are not happy" with SpringBoard, Anderson said.
Assistant Superintendent
for Curriculum Barb VeNard talked about how partnering with
Scottsdale would bring down costs. She also said teacher training
wasn't very much, and consumable textbooks will cost about $200,000
each year. Left unsaid was whether teachers will be paid for
required SpringBoard training sessions in July. "Professional
development credits" are just Confederate money in GPS.
It's interesting that
the
Scottsdale USD placed a much larger price tag on adopting this
curriculum:
"This initiative
will cost about $890,000 over four years, mostly for teacher
training."
The College Board has been
under great scrutiny in recent days for losing its way
as a non-profit: College Board Cashing In On Push For More Degrees:
College Board's net
revenues, which hit $65.6 million in 2010--the last year for
which the figure was available from tax filings--up from $53
million the year before. The test supplier paid at least two
dozen employees over $230,000 in 2010. Its president, Gaston
Caperton, earns more than $1 million annually--almost double
what he made in 2005--and has a $125,000 expense account.
The College Board,
which also administers Advanced-Placement exams, has tried to
make AP classes mandatory in every California high school.
Nationally, in the Class of 2011, more than 1.6 million
high-school seniors had taken the SAT, a 30 percent increase
from a decade ago. The test costs $49. Sending SAT scores to up
to four colleges is free, after which it costs students $10.50
for every additional college. Rush delivery is an additional $30
per school. AP exams cost $87 each, and students took 3.1
million of these tests in the 2009-10 school year.
In addition, we can look to
the experience of Hillsborough County Schools, Florida,
with SpringBoard.
New Curriculum Becomes A SpringBoard For Teacher
Criticism, March 06, 2009:
Themes have replaced
the traditional approach to language arts.
The theme in 10th grade is "Culture." In place of world
literature, students tackle a mixture of topics ranging from
Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" and Soviet Nobel literature
prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn's writings to "Cinderella"
and clips from "I Love Lucy."
"The American Dream" replaces 11th-grade American literature,
with a span of subjects from Arthur Miller's play about
witchcraft, "The Crucible," to clips from the movie "Monty
Python and the Holy Grail."
Seniors contemplate "How Perception Changes Reality" instead of
British literature. Media reports of the 1991 Waco massacre, the
contemporary novel "My Sister's Keeper," and clips from "Forrest
Gump" may replace "Beowulf" and the poetry of Yeats and Shelley.
...Three-quarters of
the way through the school year, math teachers say they see
little change, while some high school English teachers are
concerned.
"The meat's not there," said Holly Bentley, a national
board-certified English teacher at Brandon High School. She
teaches sophomore and junior honors English. "There is no
grammar. There is no vocabulary."
"All classical
literature is gone," said Lee Rich, a Sickles High School
language arts teacher in her 24th year. "They're going to go to
college with no classical literature and limited poetry
instruction."
...SpringBoard is
beefing up its curriculum, and Hillsborough has influenced that,
Wuckovich said, because "we are the largest consumer."
An article shilling for
The College Board explains
how Hillsborough Schools adopted SpringBoard for some 190,000
students in a district that covers more territory than the state of
Rhode Island:
Because the
curriculum was completely new, "all of our language arts
teachers became first-year teachers in the summer of 2007,"
when the second wave of training was scheduled for math and
English teachers, Bergholm said. "It was a tremendous effort to
train some 2,000 teachers, but SpringBoard provided an
incredible cadre of trainers who understood our state tests and
what we were trying to do."
Read more about how this
non-profit actually works:
Not-for-Profit College Board Getting Rich as Fees Hit Students,
Aug 17, 2011:
The College Board by
1999 was facing cash-flow problems. CEO Caperton turned the
nonprofit company into a thriving business, more than doubling
revenue to $660 million by boosting fees, expanding the Advanced
Placement program and the sale of names of teenage test-takers
to colleges. A former West Virginia governor, he persuaded 11
states to cover fees for a preliminary SAT in the 10th grade.
"College Board is
more interested in marketing and selling things than it is
in its primary responsibility, promoting equity and educational
opportunity," said Ted O'Neill, who stepped down as admissions
dean of the University of Chicago in 2009 and served on several
College Board committees.
CEO Gaston
Caperton... worked to bolster revenue, expanding products such
as the Student Search Service, which sells to colleges the
names of test takers at 33 cents each. The company had $63
million in sales from its business that includes selling names
in the year ended June 2010, almost 10 percent of total revenue.
By 2008, 10
states agreed to pay fees to the College Board for 10th-graders
to take the PSAT, according to a College Board newsletter.
Texas appropriated money a year later.
College Board
spent $726,000 on lobbying in the year ended June 2010,
while ACT, spent $101,000 in the corresponding fiscal year,
according to tax returns.
The Texas
legislature allocated $26 million in 2009 to fund tests for two
years. It declined to extend funding this year due to budget
cuts. Individual school districts can still pay for the tests on
their own. South Carolina and Hawaii, which had previously paid
for the tests, have also cut off funding.
College students also criticize College Board for outrageous
profiteering at the expense of students and educators:
Americans for
Educational Testing Reform, an organization that explores issues
of fairness in standardized testing, writes that the College
Board's 9.5% profit "would be respectable for a for-profit
company," but that "when a non-profit company is earning
those profits, something is wrong." AETR is hardly alone in
its criticism of College Board—with these exorbitant profits, it
has abused its tax-exempt status as a non-profit organization,
and it has formed a monopoly out of the educational
establishment such that consumers have no choice but to buy its
product.
The intensified relationship between big business and education,
embodied by College Board, is most dangerous where a
single organization's interest in profit has a determinative
effect on what is taught in schools.
In 2008 College
Board made a logical business decision to eliminate AP tests in
several subjects including Italian, Latin Literature, and French
Literature. Here, normal business practices translated into a
bad decision for education. The effect was to send the message
to schools that these subjects are not important to teach.
One of the biggest
criticisms of The College Board is that it fans flames of tension
between social class, culture, and SAT performance. Would your child
in Gilbert Public Schools get the correct answer to the famous
regatta analogy?
Students were asked
to find an analogy for "runner" and "marathon." The correct
answer was the pair "oarsman" and "regatta."
Here's more about
College Board's revenues and lobbying.
College Board Cashing In On Push For More Degrees:
The national push to
increase the number of Americans with college degrees is
enriching at least one key beneficiary: the College Board, the
nonprofit organization best known for administering the SAT.
College Board's net
revenues, which hit $65.6 million in 2010--the last year for
which the figure was available from tax filings--up from $53
million the year before. The test supplier paid at least two
dozen employees over $230,000 in 2010. Its president, Gaston
Caperton, earns more than $1 million annually--almost double
what he made in 2005--and has a $125,000 expense account.
And the College
Board, which also administers Advanced-Placement exams, has
tried to make AP classes mandatory in every California high
school. Nationally, in the Class of 2011, more than 1.6
million high-school seniors had taken the SAT, a 30 percent
increase from a decade ago. The test costs $49. Sending SAT
scores to up to four colleges is free, after which it costs
students $10.50 for every additional college. Rush delivery is
an additional $30 per school. AP exams cost $87 each, and
students took 3.1 million of these tests in the 2009-10 school
year.
Caperton's salary
increase since 2005 alone could have paid for the PSAT to be
given for free to almost 34,000 students. And the College
Board's revenues in excess of expenditures last year were enough
to have provided a refund to every student who paid full price
to take the SAT.
If College Board is
taking advantage of individual students, school districts must look
like quite a honey pot!
Here's a sample from a
Facebook page of "Things we have learned from SpringBoard"
-
People have
different cultures. And German men write more violent stories.
-
William Shakespeare
wasted his life.
-
Cinderella's sister
cut off her toe to fit in the slipper and the Prince is a
dumb*ss for not noticing the blood... :) what a great lesson!
-
In the Romeo and
Juliet movies, neither movie had decent death scenes.
From a
DeKalb, Georgia school district blog, which promotes itself as
hosting a dialogue among parents, educators and community members
focused on improving our schools and providing a quality, equitable
education for each of our nearly 100,000 students:
The College Board's
Springboard website does not list a single independent study of
the effectiveness of Springboard. The web site touts DCSS as a
major success for the Springboard curriculum, and provides
statistics like "every DeKalb middle school using SpringBoard
improved its percentage of students meeting or exceeding the
state's standard on the 2008 Grade 8 Writing Assessment compared
with 2007."
Teachers just read
prepackaged Springboard lessons to their students. Students
loath it even more, and call it tedious, boring, and
mind-numbing. They call it Springbored. Language arts teachers
tell me that without Springboard, their students would spend
much more time reading books and writing in class.
Commenters on the blog
are very direct. A sample of comments:
I also heard that
the Bd announced that DeKalb was discontinuing Spring Board and
everyone cheered. I've had two children subjected to it.
Total, complete waste of instructional time. If we are paying
for it, then it is a total complete waste of taxpayer money. All
teachers in magnet program hate it.
The teachers were
most unhappy about the fact that they had not been consulted
about its implementation or its effectiveness along the way.
Besides the issues raised by the post, it also detracts from the
ability of the teachers to be creative so the best and the
brightest teachers are motivated to leave DCSS.
I teach in
Hillsborough and it's bad. All our grades dropped, FCAT*
reading dropped, and attendance didn't improve, yet the district
doesn't blame SB, they blame the teachers. TOTAL nightmare, and
now we have to teach it 100 percent of the time.
* Note: FCAT is
the Florida equivalent of AIMS. This year, so many
students failed parts of the exam, the state of Florida
changed the grading criteria to pass more students.
Test Scores Plummet, So Florida Drops Passing Grade!
It strikes at the
heart of teaching as a profession. I am either trusted as a
professional to design instruction or I'm not. And while I see
districts panicking about AYP, etc., and I get that, this is NOT
the answer. Until educators are able to design their own
rigorous and engaging instruction based on the students looking
back up at them, we're scr*wed.
A remarkable resource
for SpringBoard commentary comes from
the blog of April Griffin, a member of the Hillsborough County
School Board. What is it about district administrators that so
many thrive on intimidating and retaliating against teachers?
I would still
like to see the research that "proves" that this curriculum
really does improve student-achievement in every type of
classroom, whether it is varying grade-levels, honors, regular,
inner-city, suburban, etc. Teachers are afraid to speak out. I
haven't spoken to a single English teacher that believes that
SpringBoard is better for all students. They are all concerned.
Most teachers believe it should be a tool for the classroom, not
obligatory to the extent that it is. It is sad that the only
people in the classroom everyday are the very people that are
not listened to and are afraid to speak up. It speaks volumes
about the climate of this county. We will all have to wait and
see what happens. Sadly, some of the very best teachers may not
be around to find out. What's even sadder, is I am afraid to post
this...
I'm feeling your
pain --and mine. We will not only lose teachers, but
students.
SpringBoard has
essentially broken my spirit and my love of teaching.
...I, too, feel the fear of repercussion if I speak out. ...Our
school TOLD us not to say anything negative to the supervisors
when they come and randomly observe us this year.
...Parents HAVE NO CLUE about what's going on and that WE have
to spin this garbage into something good. I swear, when my child
hits 6th grade, home schooling's a-coming!
I can't defend it
anymore. I, too, have never seen my children complain like
this. I went from being the class everyone wanted to be in
because they learned because they were challenged and they had
fun because of the climate my curriculum development and passion
facilitated. Now I am just a "facilitator" who pedals cr*p that
I don't even believe in. I am sickened by what is going on. The
fact that at least 80 percent of English teachers find it
mediocre or horrid should prove the inequities in this
hodgepodge, unproven product. When the kids complain, I now just
tell them, "We are doing it because we have to, and if you don't
like it, tell the school board."
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