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PSU College Bowl champs

In a February 11, 2004 post on my Joe's School weblog about the State Board of Higher Education, I talked about the record breaking performance of Portland State's College Bowl team during my freshman year there (1964-65), and the frenzied response of not only the school but the entire state to the team's shocking success .

Here's a picture of the team, courtesy of the Daily Vanguard.  Click here to read the accompanying article.
                                        

The "nickel and dime" approach to school leadership

Former teaching colleague from Hillsboro, Walt Hellman-- that's Dr. Hellman to you -- published a longer version of his Oregonian op-ed piece on diminishing school funding in April's edition of Today's OEA.  His thesis is this:  we are paying less for schools now than we did 15 years ago.  Why?  Because we have voted either directly (Measure 5, Measure 30) or indirectly (electing anti-tax fools to the legislature) to lower our collective tax burden.

Here are the other salient points he makes, well known to me but maybe not to those who don't pay attention:

• Measure 5, the property tax limitation, was supposed to "force the the passage of a fairer replacement tax."  It never happened.
• Measure 5 made school funding a state rather than local responsibility, without a new source of revenue to cover the costs. 
• The state income tax "is the same as it was in 1990 and business taxes have been reduced."
• We can't "expect to have a 2005 education system at far below 1990 prices."
• "If we want to adequately fund public education we are going to have to raise some taxes."

The first and the last points remind me of my 1993 school board endorsement interview with the editorial panel at Willamette Week, the same people who urged a yes vote on Measure 5.

When asked by the arrogant Mark Zusman why I wanted to run for school board, I said that my main issue was adequate school funding.

He cut me off, and asked again, "But why do you want to run for school board?" as if I were some naif who didn't realize that the board had no statutory taxing authority.  (I should have walked out right then with some curt remark about the Measure 5 endorsement.) 

Unsurprisingly, Willamette Week ended up endorsing an anti-tax and (probably) anti-public school candidate with a crackpot scheme for turning every school in the 90 school district into a virtual autonomous entity with full budgetary control over the funds they were allotted. 

School funding, of course, wasn't my only issue, but I am firmly convinced that it remains the key issue for the future of public education.  Yet I have yet to see any elected member of the school board or any district administrator stand up and call for the tax reform necessary to raise revenues adequate to the task of running a first rate school system.

What we hear instead are calls for program cuts and  school closures. Vicki Phillips now wants to cut golf, tennis, and dance to save a few more bucks.  And to raise athletic participation fees by $50 per student, which means it would cost $175 to play a school "sponsored" sport.

The once exemplary Portland Public School District is being nickel and dimed into mediocrity. 

Pulling the plug on hypocrisy

Doug Ireland reports that Terri Schiavo's father, Robert Schindler, is a hypocrite. Like Tom DeLay, he pulled the plug on one of his parents--his mother:

""But, given the vehemence with which he has been fighting to prolong Terri's life, it is a little surprising to learn that Robert decided to turn off the life-support system for his mother. She was 79 at the time, and had been ill with pneumonia for a week, when her kidneys gave out. 'I can remember like yesterday the doctors said she had a good life. I asked, "If you put her on a ventilator does she have a chance of surviving, of coming out of this thing?' Robert says."  I was very angry with God because I didn't want to make those decisions.' "

Probably not as angry as God is with you, Mr. Schindler.  The Bible teaches us that God does not look kindly on hypocrites.  At least Jesus didn't.

Ireland also links to this blog which exposes the hypocrisy of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the noted neurologist who "diagnosed" Terri Schiavo's condition from the Senate floor after viewing video tapes of her supposed "interaction" with her parents.  Frist criticized John Edwards for hinting that Christopher Reeve  might one day recover from his paralysis if stem cell research were allowed to go forward:

"Frist responded on a 2004 conference call with reporters arranged by the Bush-Cheney campaign: 'I find it opportunistic to use the death of someone like Christopher Reeve -- I think it is shameful -- in order to mislead the American people… We should be offering people hope, but neither physicians, scientists, public servants or trial lawyers like John Edwards should be offering hype.

“ 'It is cruel to people who have disabilities and chronic diseases, and, on top of that, it's dishonest. It's giving false hope to people, and I can tell you as a physician who's treated scores of thousands of patients that you don't give them false hope.' [CNN.com, 10/12/04] But that's just what Frist did in his Senate speech on behalf of the Bush-Rove-DeLay bill Congress passed when it intervened in the Schiavo case."

Ireland wrote an article for the LA Weekly exposing Frist as a fraud:

"Frist was born rich, and got richer — thanks to massive criminal fraud by the family business. The basis of the Frist family fortune is HCA Inc. (Hospital Corporation of America), the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother. And, just as Karl Rove was engineering the scuttling of Trent Lott and the elevation of Frist, the Bush Justice Department suddenly ended a near-decadelong federal investigation into how HCA for years had defrauded Medicaid, Medicare and Tricare (the federal program that covers the military and their families), giving the greedy health-care behemoth’s executives a sweetheart settlement that kept them out of the can."

Finally, here's the LA Times article which exposed Tom DeLay, who recently told a group of conservative supporters that the Terri Schaivo case was "God's gift to us", as a hypocrite and political opportunist of the worst sort.

Why not K -8 schools?

The most telling part of yesterday's Oregonian story about Superintendent Vicki Phillip's plan to close two middle schools and send the students to Jefferson as a reconfigured grade 7-12  school was this buried gem about the academic performance of middle schools:

"Today, most of the nation's sixth- through eighth-graders attend middle schools.

"But middle schools have never delivered academically. A 2004 review by the RAND Corp. found that about 70 percent of eighth-graders in U.S. public schools were not proficient in reading, math and science on national achievement tests. RAND recommended that districts consider groupings other than middle schools."

That comes as no surprise to me.  My entire family went to K-8 schools before entering high school.  I never did understand the rationale for the middle school model in the first place, let alone similarly structured junior high schools. 

I have nothing against 7-12 schools (I taught in one for two years), but here's a better idea:  shut down all the middle schools and send the students back to grade schools-- K-8 grade schools!

Middle school reform is based entirely on emulating grade schools.  What better way to finish that reform than by turning middle schools back into grade schools?  The self-contained grade school classroom is a perfect small community of learning, the most fundamental feature of a restructured school.  It allows for integrated instruction and provides the flexibility to group and regoup students according to their needs and abilities.  Scheduling would be a breeze, all handled by teachers working as a team across two, maybe three grade levels. The possibilities are endless.

Grade school teachers see themselves as generalists rather than specialists.  That's a good thing, something that's missing in the increasingly subject-oriented culture of the average middle school.  Most middle school teachers are trained and certified in a particular academic "field".  If truth be told, most would rather teach in a high school.

I was high school language arts and reading teacher before I took a job as a developmental reading instructor at a Hillsboro junior high school.  It wasn't long before the school reform bug infected me and a few other like-minded teachers.  After a few long, but exciting, years of hard work, I found myself teaching math (up to Algebra I), life science, health (including sex ed), and social studies.  Even P.E.  My last few years at Evergreen Middle School as a team teacher were by far the best, and most fulfilling, of my public education career. 

The good news in Portland is that high schools are trying to reform themselves with "academies", or schools within schools.  They're trying to reinvent themselves as smaller, more intimate, communities of learning, to better connect with their students

The bad news is that funding shortages may undermine those efforts.  Portland's school choice policy doesn't help matters either.

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In a related development, NEA President Reg Weaver reports that a National Conference of State Legislatures task force has issued a scathing  critique of the No Child Left Behind Act:

"The Republicans and Democrats on this Task Force found serious 'methodological   flaws' in the law's centerpiece—its Adequate Yearly Progress   (AYP) provisions—noting that schools must be evaluated by comparing 'successive   groups of students against a static, arbitrary standard, not by tracking the   progress of the same group of students over time.' And the state legislators   recommended that the states be given greater flexibility in meeting the AYP   objectives. What's more, they called for allowing multiple measures in   evaluating student performance rather than relying exclusively on standardized   tests."

I've written before that test scores are no measure of a school's performance.  Authentic assessments, which measure what students can actually do rather than what they know, in combination with a survey of a school's instructional programs, might yield a clearer picture of how well a school is functioning.  It has been predicted that well over half the schools in the country will fail to meet NCLB's AYP standards by 2014.   

As I pointed out in a previous post, not a single Portland high school currently meets the draconian (and punitive) federal standards. 

 

Death, schools, and gambling

Here's what bothers me most about the Terri Schiavo story-- aside from the idiocy of cable news coverage and the political posturing of nationally elected officials:  the claim by Terri's supporters-- the right to lifers, the Catholic Church, and assorted others with a tenuous grasp of reality-- that keeping a woman alive with a feeding tube is not an extraordinary medical intervention.

They argue that all humans need food and water to survive.  I counter that they also need oxygen.  How then is a feeding tube for people who can't eat different from a respirator for people who can't breathe?  That's certainly considered an extraordinary medical intervention.  That's what people think of when they talk about "pulling the plug."

It also irritates me to hear people compare Terri's care to pet dogs.  It's a criminal offense to deny them food and water.  But it's not, I would counter, a criminal offense to euthanize them, to put them, in other words, out of their misery.  It happens all the time. 

Oregon is the one enlightened state in the nation when it comes to end of life treatment options.  Here, doctors can legally assist in the suicide of terminally ill, meaning dying, patients.  Terri Schiavo is already dead.  Or at least, she would be were it not for the extraordinary medical intervention that keeps her heart beating.

Bob Herbert puts it all into perspective in his latest column:

"Congress is in recess and the press has gone berserk over the Terri Schiavo case. So very little attention is being paid to pending budget proposals that are scandalously unfair, but that pretty accurately reflect the kind of country the U.S. has become.

"President Bush believes in an "ownership" society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the wealthy."

The right wingers championing Terri's right to live indefinitely in a vegetative state extend the definition of berserk.  Her father, Robert Schindler, said on TV the other day, "There's nothing wrong with her."  Andrew McCarthy in the National Review claims that she's the victim of a "court ordered torture-murder":

"She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order."

He also claims, bizarrely, that she is "alive and, periodically, both alert and responsive."

She even has her own website.  It says:

"Terri is puposefully interactive, alert, curious, lovely young woman who lives with a very serious disability.  She lives free of any life support machines and receives nutrition through a tube that is only present at meal times."

As I said, these people are seriously divorced from reality.

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Back to schools. According to a front page story in the Oregonian, restaurant and bar owners are squaring off against school advocates over who gets the bulk of the revenues from the proposed new slot machines Gov. Kulongoski wants added to the Oregon Lottery.  The bar owners are demanding more than the 15% cut that Lottery director, Dale Penn, has offered:

"Angry bar and restaurant owners warned Oregon Lottery officials Friday that they would refuse to carry the state's new electronic slot games unless the lottery backs away from a proposal to slash their share of the take."

Their share?  That sounds like extortion from the most powerful lobby in the state.

Of course, revenue from the expanded Lottery totals a paltry $360 million dollars.  It's unseemly, to my way of thinking, for proponents of adequate school funding to mud-wrestle with the restaurant lobby over gambling money.

But such is the state of public education funding in Oregon.

 

School choice and school enrollment

My contention that school choice in Portland contributes to declining school enrollment was published as a "My View" opinion piece in today's Portland Tribune. 

What I submitted to the Tribune (and the Oregonian, which also wanted to run it) was based on my March 10 post, "Portland's precipitous enrollment decline: How do you stop it?" After some minor editing changes, including some deletions, I think I prefer the original post to what the Tribune ran.  I admit that I changed the format and content rather significantly, perhaps thinking too much about the wider newspaper reading audience.

Here's what the Tribune left out, which I kinda liked:

"For some bizarre reason, upper crust Ainsworth (94% capture rate) was made the district's Spanish Immersion magnet. Applegate, a North Portland school slated for closure, with a Hispanic enrollment of 30% and a neighborhood capture rate of 44%, might have been the better choice.

"But Applegate is a working class school."   

Rich school, poor school

Insufferable Portland Tribune columnist Promise King yesterday called Jefferson High School "an academic embarassment to the district", and called for the superintendent "to close this nonperforming school and rescue its students from academic underachievement." 

He also seemed to question the viability of public education:

"This is the time to ask hard questions about how the district will bring about academic achievement for all its students.

"My question is, do we still believe public education best serves our collective interest? Let me know."

Since he's asking for my opinion, here it is:

Since the 1995-96 school year, the four wealthiest and whitest high schools in the district have increased enrollment by an average of nearly 10%, while the four poorest and most ethnically diverse have suffered enrollment declines ranging from 19% (Madison) to 38% (Jefferson).

Jefferson, with a 12% white enrollment, actually has far better test scores than Roosevelt  (41% white), which has also experienced a catastrophic loss of students-- about 34% since 1995-6.  Marshall (55% white) fares little better in a comparison of test scores.  It too has lost a hefty percentage of students since 1995-6 -- 28%. So why single out Jefferson as a district "embarrassment"?  Why not Roosevelt or Marshall?

The three middle schools--Green, Tubman, and Whitaker-- that feed into Jefferson are burdened with low test scores.  The percentage of 8th graders from the three schools who meet or exceed benchmarks in reading and math average 41% and 34%, respectively.  Lincoln's middle school feeder, West Sylvan, has 8th grade  proficiency rates of 91% and 92%  Scores for 10th graders, as is typical throughout the district (and the state), drop for both Jefferson and Lincoln.  One could argue, however, since many of the higher scoring students from Jefferson's feeder schools probably choose to attend Grant or Benson, that Jefferson is actually doing a better job of educating its students than Lincoln.  Based on test scores, it's educational program is certainly superior to Wilson's, the second wealthiest high school in the district. The 8th grade proficiency percentages of Wilson's feeders (Gray and Jackson)  average slightly over 80% for both reading and math.  Wilson's 10th graders drop off dramatically to 57% and 67%, respectively.  Now that's an embarassing "performance".

Of course, I don't agree that you can draw any conclusions about schools by looking at test scores, especially without considering student demographics.  It's clear--crystal clear, if you look at the data-- that a powerful correlation exists between student performance on standardized tests and school demographics, including poverty, ethnicity, and the number of non-English speaking and learning disabled students.

On the other hand, school enrollment data does suggest, at least to me, that the  district's school choice policy may be directly responsible for the apparent migration of students from poor schools to wealthier ones.  That, in turn, accounts in large part for the dismal overall test perforrmance of students left behind in poverty-ridden schools, as I have written on several occasions.  The precipitous enrollment decline in Portland over the past two years, in large part, can also be attributed to school choice, along with the misleading use of terms on "school report cards" like "unsatisfactory" and "failing" (and the media's favorite-- "underperforming") to characterize schools with low test scores. 

Even the district's "best" high school, Lincoln (81% white, over 80% of 10th graders meeting or exceeding reading and math benchmarks), has failed to meet federal Adequate Yearly Progress standards for its handful of economically disadvantaged, Black, and Hispanic students.  By the terms of No Child Left Behind, it too is a failing school.  Just like Jefferson and Roosevelt.  And all of the other high schools in Portland.

If Promise King, like the ideologues who concocted No Child Left Behind, believes that a privatized education system can do a better job educating kids--and that means all kids-- than the publicly funded common schools that you and I attended, he ought to just come out and say so.  And let the debate begin, openly, without the politics and the subterfuge surrounding federal, state, and local educational policies.

 

Busted! Texas educators caught cheating, again!

Just as I predicted in yesterday's post on the idiotic proposal to link teacher pay to test scores, two fifth grade teachers in Houston were fired for cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills:

"Fourteen students reported that at least one of the teachers placed a mark on the question if the children got it wrong, so they could review the question and change their answer. And five of those students say that the teacher gave them the right answer if they got the answer wrong the second time around."

In many districts in Texas, administrators earn bonuses of $5,000 for good test scores.  Superintendents can earn up to $20,000.  So the incentive, in the form of pressure from the higher ups, is there for teachers to cut ethical corners. 

This article from the Washington Post over a year ago expalins how testing works in Texas, and how big a deal it is.  And, of course, Rod Paige, the godfather of No Child Left Behind, is right in the middle of it all:

"Springtime is testing season for the 200,000 or so students who attend Houston public schools, and it is approached with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for sporting events. There are pep rallies and marching bands, and results are blared from billboards and bumper stickers. The tests determine whether students advance to the next grade, whether teachers are promoted and whether administrators earn annual bonuses.

"Although the system of high-stakes testing predated his appointment as school superintendent, Paige quickly became a symbol of the accountability movement. A former college education dean, Paige joined forces with local business leaders who favored a results-oriented approach to education that included rewards for success and penalties for failure. Soon after he became superintendent, he introduced a system of one-year contracts for school administrators, effectively tying their job security to the accomplishment of measurable goals."

Many researchers have said that the "corruption of educators" is inevitable when "high stakes testing" is adopted as an "accountability" measure.  Sharon Nichols and David Berliner, for example, list ten negative effects of high stakes testing, which includes the heavily test oriented and punitive NCLB:

8. Questions about the Meaning of Proficiency: After raising achievement benchmarks, Maine considered lowering them over concerns that higher standards will hurt the state when it comes to No Child Left Behind.

Here are a few of the rest:

1. Administrator and Teacher Cheating: In Texas, an administrator gave students who performed poorly on past standardized tests incorrect ID numbers to ensure their scores would not count toward the district average.

2. Student Cheating: Nearly half of 2,000 students in an online Gallop poll admitted they have cheated at least once on an exam or test. Some students said they were surprised that the percentage was not higher.

5. Teaching to the Test: Teachers are forced to cut creative elements of their curriculum like art, creative writing, and hands-on activities to prepare students for the standardized tests. In some cases, when standardized tests focus on math and reading skills, teachers abandon traditional subjects like social studies and science to drill students on test-taking skills.

6. Narrowing the Curriculum: In Florida, a fourth-grade teacher showed her students how to navigate through a 45-minute essay portion of the state’s standardized exam. The lesson was helpful for the test, but detrimental to emerging writers because it diluted their creativity and forced them to write in a rigid format.

It amazes me that despite all these revelations, people still talk about standardized tests as the key to accountability.  Even here in Oregon.

Click here for another (concise) indictment of NCLB and high stakes testing from Michael Martin of the Arizona School Boards Association.

 

 

Test score-based merit pay, and other right wing fantasies

An ugly stew of anti-teacher legislation is simmering in the Republican-dominated Oregon House of Representatives, including one to link teacher pay to students' test scores.

Now it's clear that elected officials --Democrats as well as Republicans-- know little about education, but the test-based merit pay suggestion is about as stupid as a public policy can get.

Assume for the sake of argument that no education takes place outside the classroom-- a dubious assumption at best.  But just assume, for now, that that the only influences on a child's ability to read or compute take place in a school classroom.  Assume further that learning begins at age five in kindergarten.  Even then, the idea that teaching competence can be determined by test scores is assinine.

In Oregon, students are tested at grades 3, 5, 8, and 10, so the test score criteria would theoretically apply only to teachers at those levels.  But a third grade teacher in a self-contained classroom teaches not only reading and math, but several other state-mandated subjects.  Furthermore, the teacher benefits, or suffers, from student learning that took place in grades K, 1, and 2.  Same for fifth grade teachers, who are dependent on the skills of at least five preceding teachers.

Of course,  we could mandate that tests be given every school year (never mind the expense), but even then,  the validity of test data for merit pay would be limited to primary grade teachers.  In middle school and high school, no single teacher is responsible for either reading or math skills.  And cumulative learning would have to be factored in.  The reading ability of an eighth grade student, for example, is dependent on the efforts of at least eight different earlier teachers

Or maybe we could give students a whole battery of tests, one for every conceivable subject area.  But even then there would be problems.   Test score aggregates would have to be broken down by classroom.  And there would have to be separate and discrete assessments for each sub-skill in areas like math, science, even social science.  For example, science isn't just science, in a generic sense.  The field encompasses biology, chemistry, physics, physiology, ecology, geology, and other areas that I'm probably overlooking.  These distinctions begin not in high school, but as soon as science is introduced to students in the earliest grades. 

If pay or tenure were tied to test scores, one can only imagine what would happen in schools.  Actually, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that instruction would become exclusively "teaching to the test."  Hey, it happened in Texas under former Houston  Superintendent  of  Schools, Rod Paige, who went on to become Bush's first Secretary  of Education, and resulted in the test crazy No Child Left Behind Act.

Of course, everyone should know by now that standardized test scores are a limited, and lousy, measure of student learning.  And that learning begins long before students enter school. 

But school and teacher accountability is quite seductive to politicians scrambling to find adequate resources to fund public education.  Seductive and stupid.

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Speaking of resources, we keep hearing anti-tax proponents talking about how families "tighten their belts" in tough economic times, and learn to live on what they have. So governments should follow suit.

Well, it turns out that family belt tightening is a myth.  What actually happens, at least in America, is that families borrow lots of money, go into debt, and often end up declaring bankruptcy.

Here are the figures from an article in today's Oregonian business section:

"Total outstanding U.S. consumer credit per capita -- including credit cards and nonrevolving credit such as car loans -- increased from $3,559 in 1980 to $6,965 in 2004, a rise of nearly 96 percent. The numbers were from January of each year and adjusted for inflation, in 2004 dollars.

"The larger increase was specifically in revolving credit, which is composed almost entirely of credit cards. Between 1980 and 2004, the outstanding revolving consumer credit per capita rose from $568 to $2,622, an increase of about 360 percent. The revolving credit figures also are adjusted for inflation." 

 

 

Academic rigor, redux

In my March 4 post, "Rigor or Relevance", I questioned the wisdom of reforming high schools through higher standards and more rigorous academics:

"Of course, the governors also want to cut the high school dropout rate, which raises the question: Can you keep kids in school by making all of them take college prep courses?  By making high school even more difficult, and for some kids, even more boring?  Hmmmm.  I don't think so."

An op-ed piece in today's Oregonian reinforces what I said then and what I believe about the nature and purpose of public education.  Written by Lewis and Clark College Professor of Education, Gregory Smith, the opinion piece reminds us of the social and economic realities of  modern life.  And of the genius (or at least inspired thinking) of Oregon's Educational Act for the 21st Century-- the original CIM and  CAM, which was gutted by a later, more conservative legislature.

Here's what Smith wrote:

"In a democracy, schools should help children with diverse abilities and interests to become self-supporting adults. The recent governor's conference on education, however, reaffirmed the nation's preoccupation with a definition of school achievement focused on a narrow set of academic skills and knowledge

('Governors commit to making high school tougher,' Feb. 28).

"According to this vision, America's educational system should graduate 100 percent of its students from high school and, theoretically, 100 percent from college. This vision takes into account neither human variability nor the needs of our communities. It also serves to obscure the true source of economic disparity in this country: our collective unwillingness to reward all work with a living wage.

"Drawing upon U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Richard Rothstein, a former New York Times education reporter, has written tellingly about job growth in the United States being primarily located in occupations that do not require a college education. Even if a greater proportion of U.S. students were to earn baccalaureate degrees, there would not be enough high-skilled and high-paying positions for them to fill.

"Why then are governors and business leaders so determined to make high school tougher?

"Sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb provide a possible answer in their book, 'The Hidden Injuries of Class.' They describe the way low-paid workers in the United States ascribe their socio-economic status to their own failure to take advantage of this country's apparent opportunities. Because school performance is often associated with economic outcomes, less successful students tend to blame themselves rather than social inequities for their inability to earn better incomes.

"As this self-blaming has become a part of more and more peoples' lives, it is not surprising that labor unions have weakened and the salaries of corporate owners and managers increased. If schools reward only the academically inclined, education initiatives based solely upon a restricted definition of excellence and accountability will exacerbate this process. They will increase competition for a diminishing number of well-paying jobs while at the same time expanding the number of people who have been labeled and then often see themselves as inadequate.

"Oregon's original Educational Act for the 21st Century, passed in 1991, was not like this. In addition to putting in place a system for assessing achievement, it aimed to address the needs of the 50 percent of students who choose not to or are unable to attend college. These students represent many of the people who make life possible in industrial society. They are the people who care for the young and elderly, the people who construct houses and repair cars, the people who serve us in restaurants and supermarkets, the people who build and maintain the infrastructure of our towns and cities.

"By joining required coursework to central community functions, the Educational Act of the 21st Century combined accountability with educational programs designed to help young people discover the confluence of their own talents and social needs. It sought to encourage all students to become productive citizens confident of their abilities and their capacity to contribute to their communities.

"Calls to link high school graduation to the completion of an expanded but narrowly conceived college prep curriculum honor the talents of only a proportion of our fellow citizens. Coupled with a failure to mandate a living wage for all work, such calls may inadvertently consign the remainder to lives of potential poverty and regret."

I frequently need to remind people that the original CIM and CAM assessments were performance based.  In other words, they were measures of what a student could actually do, rather than simply of what (s)he knew.  The legislature replaced those performance assessments with subject area tests-- reading, math, science, etc.--partly out of stupidity, and partly because of the disastrous effects on Measure 5 on school funding. 

Now we're stuck with school report cards based on standardized achievement tests, hardly the vision of the original CIM planners.