1 1 COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA 2 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES EDUCATION COMMITTEE 3 IRVIS OFFICE BUILDING 4 ROOM G-50 HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA 5 HOUSE BILL 168 6 HOUSE BILL 177 PUBLIC HEARING 7 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2015 8 9:05 A.M.
9 BEFORE: 10 HONORABLE STANLEY E. SAYLOR, MAJ. CHAIRMAN 11 HONORABLE HAL ENGLISH HONORABLE MARK M. GILLEN 12 HONORABLE SETH M. GROVE HONORABLE KRISTIN LEE PHILLIPS-HILL 13 HONORABLE KATHY L. RAPP HONORABLE CRAIG STAATS 14 HONORABLE MIKE TOBASH HONORABLE DAN TRUITT 15 HONORABLE MIKE CARROLL HONORABLE SCOTT CONKLIN 16 HONORABLE PATRICK HARKINS HONORABLE PATTY KIM 17 HONORABLE MARK LONGIETTI HONORABLE GERALD MULLERY 18
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21 BRENDA J. PARDUN, RPR 22 P. O. BOX 278 MAYTOWN, PA 17550 23 717-426-1596 PHONE/FAX
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25 2 1 ALSO PRESENT:
2 NICHOLE DUFFY, SENIOR EDUCATION ADVISOR (R) KAREN SEIVARD, SENIOR LEGAL COUNSEL (R) 3 JONATHAN BERGER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (R) ELIZABETH MURPHY, RESEARCH ANALYST (R) 4 MICHAEL BIACCHI, RESEARCH ANALYST (R) JESSICA HENNINGER, LEGISLATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE 5 ASSISTANT (R)
6 CHRIS WAKELEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (D) WENDY HAIGOOD, LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT (D) 7
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9 BRENDA J. PARDUN, RPR REPORTER - NOTARY PUBLIC 10
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25 3 1 INDEX
2 NAME PAGE
3 LARRY WITTIG 10 CHAIRPERSON OF THE BOARD 4 STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION
5 RICHARD MARASCHIELLO 15 CONTRACTOR 6 RITA PEREZ 22 7 DIRECTOR BUREAU OF CURRICULUM, ASSESSMENT AND 8 INSTRUCTION
9 KAREN MOLCHANOW 39 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 10 STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION
11 W. GERARD OLEKSIAK 54 VICE PRESIDENT 12 PENNSYLVANIA STATE EDUCATION ASSOCIATION
13 JAKE MILLER 62 SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHER 14 GOOD HOPE MIDDLE SCHOOL CUMBERLAND VALLEY SCHOOL DISTRICT 15 RYAN BANNISTER 97 16 REGIONAL COORDINATOR LEGISLATIVE LIAISON PENNSYLVANIANS RESTORING EDUCATION 17 CHERYL BOISE 100 18 COORDINATOR AND RESEARCH CONSULTANT PENNSYLVANIANS RESTORING EDUCATION 19 ANITA HOGE 119 20 CHAIR, POLICY AND RESEARCH PENNSYLVANIANS RESTORING EDUCATION 21 DR. ERIC ESHBACH 137 22 SUPERINTENDENT NORTHERN YORK COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT 23 DR. MICHAEL SNELL 139 24 SUPERINTENDENT CENTRAL YORK SCHOOL DISTRICT 25 4 1 INDEX (cont’d)
2 NAME PAGE
3 LEE ANN WENTZEL 143 SUPERINTENDENT 4 RIDLEY SCHOOL DISTRICT
5 DR. SCOTT DEISLEY 146 SUPERINTENDENT 6 RED LION AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT
7 WILLIAM LACOFF 160 PRESIDENT 8 PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL BOARDS ASSOCIATION
9 JOHN CALLAHAN 174 SENIOR DIRECTOR OF GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS 10 PENNSYLVANIA SCHOOL BOARDS ASSOCIATION
11 DAVE PATTI 178 PRESIDENT AND CEO 12 PENNSYLVANIA BUSINESS COUNCIL
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14 SUBMITTED WRITTEN TESTIMONY 15 TIFFANY REEDY 16 PRINCIPAL POTTSVILLE AREA HIGH SCHOOL 17 MICHELLE S. GUERS, ED.D. 18 ALI RHOADES HOBBS 19 DISTRICT POLICY DIRECTOR FOR REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH 20
21 (See submitted written testimony
22 and handouts online.)
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25 5 1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Good
3 morning, everybody. I’d like to call the
4 hearing to order, and I wanted to go through a
5 couple things here this morning.
6 First, I wanted to thank parents
7 and teachers and students and concerned
8 citizens of the commonwealth who have
9 contacted my office and that of Chairman
10 Roebuck’s as to the Keystone Exams and, of
11 course, Pennsylvania academic standards.
12 The education of our children is
13 an essential duty of our state government and
14 must always be a top priority of the general
15 assembly.
16 It is important to note and
17 recognize that this hearing is not the first
18 time that this committee and this general
19 assembly has had and debated and discussed our
20 state testing and our state academic
21 standards. This was achieved over the last
22 several sessions on hearings and briefings
23 that this committee has had and the general
24 assembly itself.
25 Additionally, in June of 2013, the 6 1 House unanimously adopted House Resolution
2 338, sponsored by our committee member,
3 Representative English, who called upon the
4 secretary of Education and state Board of
5 Education to review their policies relating to
6 academic standards and testing of K-through-12
7 education. It also called for specific
8 limitations on family and student data
9 collection requirements.
10 It's also important to note that
11 our intent is not to put local school
12 districts through the rigors and costs of
13 constantly changing our academic standards.
14 Pennsylvania remains committed to local
15 control and decisions regarding curriculum and
16 reading lists, which will continue to be made
17 by the local school districts.
18 Again, I want to thank the local
19 testifiers this morning.
20 And as a new chairman of the House
21 Education Committee, one of the things that I
22 have insisted upon is respect among all
23 members and those who testify before this
24 committee. And I will hold everybody to that
25 same standard today, is that we respect each 7
1 other. We have difference of opinions. But the
2 chairman will end your testimony if there is any
3 disrespect to the members or anybody else present
4 or not present today.
5 So, with that, I will ask
6 Representative Tobash and Representative Grove to
7 make opening comments.
8 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you very
9 much, Mr. Chairman. I really appreciate the
10 committee acting so quickly on this legislation
11 that is important.
12 We had similar legislation, legislation
13 in the same vein, to kind of ratchet back on our
14 standardized testing dynamic that we've got in the
15 commonwealth in the last session. We picked up
16 that effort, and we've tacked on to that some
17 legislation that has been offered before about
18 giving school districts the autonomy to decide
19 whether or not they should be a graduation
20 requirement.
21 I think it’s a very important topic.
22 Certainly we have met with administrators and
23 students and teachers and parents on this issue.
24 And I think it’s time that we really take a look at
25 assessing the assessments before we go further down 8
1 this path, at great taxpayer expense.
2 So, I appreciate all the work that the
3 committee has done in setting up this hearing, and
4 I’m interested in hearing all the testifiers.
5 Thank you very much.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Thank you,
7 Representative Tobash.
8 Representative Grove.
9 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Thank you,
10 Mr. Chairman.
11 House Bill 177 will simply establish a
12 commission to review our academic standards and
13 make a report within eighteen months of
14 establishing the commission. The commission will
15 consist of teachers, administrators, business
16 managers, higher ed employers, community leaders or
17 business leaders, all of which are key in
18 delivering education, managing education, and
19 ensuring financial responsibility in education.
20 Since Pennsylvania moved its academic
21 standards away from the Common Core last session,
22 there’s still questions from residents about it,
23 highlighted mostly by concerns raised in other
24 states from other states’ adoption of academic
25 standards. This public ire, compounded by the 9
1 federal government’s use of grants to dictate
2 education policy, has led to increased focus on
3 standards.
4 On top of this, there is much
5 misinformation, whether deliberate or
6 unintentional, about this commonwealth’s new
7 academic standards.
8 I do applaud those schools who have
9 aggressively moved forward in educating their
10 parents and community of the new standards. I hope
11 we can also create more collaboration among our
12 five hundred school districts, the department, and
13 the state board to mitigate some of the
14 misinformation and ensure our academic standards
15 are utilized in the most effective way to drive
16 improved academic achievement across this
17 commonwealth.
18 I look forward to the discussion today
19 with my colleagues and stakeholders on both these
20 important topics of academic standards and
21 federally mandated testing.
22 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
23 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Thank you,
24 Representative Grove.
25 At this point, the first panel from the 10
1 Department of Education and state board, welcome to
2 testify is Rita Perez, who's the director of Bureau
3 of Curriculum, Assessment and Instruction; John
4 Weiss, who's the assistant director of Bureau of
5 Curriculum, Assessment and Instruction; Larry
6 Wittig, who is chairman of the board of State Board
7 0 f Education; and Karen Molchanow, who is the
8 executi ve di re cto r o f the State Board of Education;
9 and Richard Maraschiello, who is a contractor. And
10 1 apologize if I mispronounced any names.
11 You may begin at any point.
12 MR. WITTIG: Thank you.
13 Good morning Chairman Saylor, Chairman
14 Roebuck and distinguished members of the House
15 Education Committee. My name is Larry Wittig, and
16 I serve as the chairman of the State Board of
17 Education.
18 You’ve already heard the introductions.
19 I’ll be redundant. With me today is Karen
20 Molchanow, executive director of the State Board,
21 and also three representatives of the Department of
22 Ed: John Weiss, Assistant Director of the Bureau
23 of Curriculum, Assessment and Instruction; along
24 with Rita Perez, in the same bureau; and Richard
25 Maraschiello, contractor for PDE. 11
1 Thank you for the opportunity to speak
2 today on the state board's long history with
3 standards and assessment, as well as review how the
4 state's current high school graduation policy
5 developed.
6 Setting state-level graduation
7 requirements has been part of the Board's
8 policy making since 1964, when the General Assembly
9 conferred this power in the Public School Code.
10 Modifications made to Board policy in 1999 resulted
11 in a requirement for school districts to consider
12 at least four measures for high school graduation.
13 Number one, course completion and
14 grades; two, completion of a culminating project;
15 three, proficiency in state standards not assessed
16 by the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment,
17 that’s PSSA; and, four, proficiency in reading,
18 writing and math as assessed by the PSSAs or local
19 assessments aligned with state standards and the
20 level of proficiency established for the PSSAs.
21 That is why we’re here today, folks,
22 because of the "or." And I want to emphasize
23 number four. This has been in place since 1999.
24 When the Board proposed that policy in
25 1998, both the House and Senate Education 12
1 Committees and the Independent Regulatory Review
2 Commission recommended that the Board establish a
3 process for determining the comparability of local
4 assessments with the PSSA. At the time, the Board
5 stated that: The most certain evidence of the
6 comparability or alignment between the local and
7 state assessments will come from repeated
8 administrations of the PSSA and local assessments.
9 If it becomes apparent that large numbers of
10 students not achieving at the proficient level on
11 the PSSAs are deemed proficient by local
12 assessments, regulation and administrative review
13 will become important.
14 To that end, the Board engaged in
15 continuous oversight of the number of students
16 issued diplomas and the number of students who
17 demonstrated proficiency on the eleventh grade
18 PSSAs in reading, writing, and mathematics.
19 This review identified a gap of more
20 than 50,000 students annually, nearly 40 percent of
21 graduates, who were issued high school diplomas
22 without demonstrating proficiency on the PSSAs. A
23 further look at the data showed this to be an issue
24 statewide with four hundred seventy-three of five
25 hundred one school districts graduating at least 20 13
1 percent more students than demonstrated proficiency
2 on the PSSAs.
3 This gap seemed to indicate that
4 locally developed school district assessments were
5 not aligned with state standards and the level of
6 rigor established for proficiency on the PSSA. The
7 Board also had concerns about the consequences of
8 this apparent misalignment for both students and
9 the commonwealth, including the impact on post
10 secondary enrollment and completion rates, reduced
11 economic opportunity, and a significant cost for
12 remedial education at our post-secondary
13 institutions. At the time, one in three high
14 school graduates who enrolled in a community
15 college or a state-owned university required course
16 work in remedial English or mathematics, at a cost
17 exceeding $26.4 million annually.
18 Thus, in 2007, the board began
19 exploring ways -- remember, 2007, as opposed to
20 '10, when core came in -- 2007 the board began
21 exploring ways to address these challenges, which
22 culminated in revisions to statewide graduation
23 requirements and the adoption of ten end-of-course
24 Keystone Exams designed to serve as comparable
25 assessments of academic standards in English, 14
1 language arts, mathematics, science and technology,
2 and the social studies.
3 In tandem with revising the assessment
4 system at the high school level, the board included
5 important supports for both students and school
6 districts in meeting the new graduation standards.
7 To this end, the Board put forward requirements for
8 supplemental instruction for students who are not
9 proficient, and required the Department of
10 Education to provide technical assistance and
11 professional development resources for districts
12 related to instruction in the content areas
13 assessed by Keystones.
14 New statewide graduation requirements,
15 including Keystone Exams as an option for assessing
16 a student's mastery of academic standards, took
17 effect in 2010. Most recently, the Board took
18 action to refine these graduation requirements in
19 response to concerns raised during the initial
20 phase of the Keystone Exam implementation. When we
21 took the show on the road and we had hearings, we
22 heard from the field, and 30 percent of the grade
23 was uniformly rejected by the field.
24 The board acted to reduce the number of
25 exams administered for graduation purposes and to 15
1 remove the connection between the exams and a
2 student's course grades. These revisions
3 maintained the intention of the board's policy to
4 establish a uniform measure of proficiency for
5 graduation, while addressing logistical concerns
6 about how early in the school year exams would need
7 to be administered in order to calculate grades and
8 concerns about the potential for inconsistent
9 implementation since Pennsylvania does not utilize
10 a statewide grading system.
11 I will now turn to representatives from
12 the Department of Ed joining me today, who will
13 discuss administration of the Keystone Exams.
14 MR. MARASCHIELLO: Good morning,
15 everyone.
16 The Keystone Exams were developed and
17 field tested during 2009 and ’10. Pennsylvania
18 educators participated in every stage of
19 development, including identifying the content to
20 be assessed, reviewing and approving each test
21 question, and setting the cut scores. The exams
22 were first administered statewide in the spring of
23 2011 for the purpose of establishing those cut
24 scores.
25 Due to budget constraints, the 16
1 Keystones were not administered during the 2011-12
2 school year. In 2012-13 school year, the Keystone
3 Exams were administered, and they replaced the
4 Grade eleven PSSA for federal accountability
5 purposes that year.
6 Three exams have been developed and
7 administered statewide three times each year since
8 the 2012-13 school year. These include algebra I,
9 literature, and biology.
10 Based on Chapter 4 regulations, each
11 Keystone Exam has two modules that reflect
12 distinct, yet related, academic content that is
13 common to a standards-aligned curriculum. The
14 exams are available in both paper/pencil and online
15 formats.
16 Beginning with the graduating class of
17 2017, students who do not score proficient or
18 advanced on their first attempt are permitted to
19 retest after successfully participating in
20 supplemental instruction provided by their local
21 education agency.
22 Chapter 4 also required the Department
23 of Education to develop supports to assist both
24 students and educators in their efforts to achieve
25 academic success. To that end, the department 17
1 developed the Classroom Diagnostic Tools, call them
2 CDT, and a Voluntary Model Curriculum.
3 The CDT provides real-time feedback on
4 individual student's strengths and areas of need
5 with dynamic links to instructional resources
6 within the department’s Standards Aligned System.
7 Teachers can utilize the sample lessons from the
8 VMC, Voluntary Model Curriculum, along with other
9 resources, such as curriculum frameworks and online
10 courses, all in planning for students’ needs and
11 then they continue to monitor student progress
12 throughout the year.
13 Chapter 4 provides multiple pathways to
14 graduation. First, students who do not pass the
15 retest may still meet graduation requirements
16 through the satisfactory completion of a project-
17 based assessment. And, second, a chief school
18 administrator, in his or her sole discretion, may
19 waive the state requirement of proficiency on the
20 three Keystone Exams on a case-by-case basis for
21 good cause.
22 If a chief school administrator grants
23 waivers for more than 10 percent of the students in
24 a graduating class because the students were not
25 successful in completing a project-based 18
1 assessment, then the chief school administrator
2 shall submit an action plan for approval by the
3 secretary of Education no later than ten days prior
4 to graduation. The action plan must identify
5 improvements they will implement in each course
6 associated with the Keystone Exam content for which
7 the waivers were requested.
8 I will now turn it back to the state
9 board who will discuss Pennsylvania's academic
10 standards.
11 MR. WITTIG: I got to do a sidebar
12 here. These acronyms — LEA, CDT, VMC -- back in
13 the standards days, I remember Hickok saying, We’re
14 not going to use acronyms anymore. No acronyms.
15 Going to be the refrigerator door approach.
16 They’re back.
17 The board’s involvement in setting
18 uniform goals for the commonwealth’s public
19 education system dates back almost as long as its
20 involvement with establishing statewide graduation
21 requirements. In 1965, the board first established
22 10 Goals of Quality Education, which described what
23 quality education programs should include in
24 schools across the commonwealth.
25 The roots of our current system of 19
1 academic standards were established in 1999, when
2 the board adopted state standards in reading,
3 writing, speaking and listening, and mathematics.
4 Through July of 2006, state academic
5 standards were developed in twelve content areas.
6 In conjunction with the adoption of state
7 standards, the board made a commitment to conduct
8 cyclical reviews of these standards to determine if
9 they are appropriate, clear, specific, and
10 challenging. Opportunities for public review and
11 comment on the standards have been extensive.
12 In 2007, the board initiated a review
13 of the state's math and English standards, and
14 engaged teams of Pennsylvania educators to
15 recommend revisions to the standards. Now this -
16 2007 is long before the Common Core ever existed.
17 The initiative was, in Pennsylvania, to review our
18 standards and see how relevant they are and update
19 them.
20 Proposed revisions were made available
21 for public review and comment in 2008, and public
22 hearings were scheduled to solicit input on
23 revisions to the standards. Shortly after this
24 work began, the Common Core State Standards emerged
25 as a policy goal of the National Governor's 20
1 Association, Council of Chief State School
2 Officers, and more than forty-five states and
3 territories. At that time, the board halted its
4 internal review of state standards to explore
5 whether Common Core was a sound alternative.
6 And all of you folks know about Race to
7 the Top money, and everybody was chasing that.
8 To inform its deliberations, the board
9 commissioned a Common Core alignment study,
10 University of Pittsburgh, and held regional public
11 roundtables to gather public feedback before
12 ultimately adopting the Common Core in July 2010.
13 At that time, the board also expressed its
14 intention to gather additional public input on
15 implementation of the standards and on whether
16 Pennsylvania should adopt additional state-specific
17 standards. The board carried through on both of
18 those intentions.
19 At the end of 2010, the board convened
20 public forums to solicit input on implementation of
21 the standards and produced guidelines for the
22 Department of Education in developing supports for
23 implementation. Moreover, the department brought
24 together Pennsylvania educators who worked together
25 to prepare revisions to the Common Core to make the 21
1 standards Pennsylvania’s own.
2 These proposed state-specific standards
3 were presented publicly in March of 2012 as the
4 Pennsylvania Core Standards, posted online for
5 public access, and underwent multiple opportunities
6 for public review and comment over the next year
7 and a half. The board was responsive to concerns
8 expressed about the standards by the public and
9 members of the general assembly and took actions to
10 withdraw its initial proposal and make revisions to
11 address concerns with implementation.
12 The department has taken further action
13 to respond to concerns with the Pennsylvania Core
14 Standards by establishing an online portal to
15 collect feedback on the eligible content alignment
16 with the standards. Interested stakeholders were
17 provided an opportunity to review and provide
18 comment to the department from October 22, 2014,
19 through January 15, 2015. This feedback has been
20 compiled and posted on the PA Academic Review
21 website as of January 31st.
22 Now, you will undoubtedly hear
23 testimony about overtesting, about additional
24 testing, too much testing, teaching to the test.
25 What, in fact, the Keystones have done is eliminate 22
1 the eleventh grade PSSA for purposes of AYP, Annual
2 Yearly progress, according to No Child Left Behind,
3 and also, the mandatory part of that ties into our
4 evaluation system, which is a key component in
5 moving forward.
6 So, Chairman Saylor, Chairman Roebuck,
7 representatives, and members of the committee, we
8 would again like to thank you for the opportunity
9 to provide comment on standards and assessments.
10 We welcome any questions you may have.
11 Thank you.
12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
13 Representative Grove.
14 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Thank you.
15 Appreciate the testimony.
16 The eligible content review, I was
17 actually just going through online, looking at some
18 of the comments. Can you just kind of provide the
19 committee an overview of the comments that were
20 requested, what type of nature were the comments
21 for the eligible content?
22 MS. PEREZ: Sure, I can do that.
23 The eligible content statements fall
24 into some broad categories, so I think I’ll just
25 give you those bullet points. Essentially, they 23
1 said they were too broad; there was too much
2 content in a single statement. They wanted us to
3 break up those statements. The language was too
4 abstract and vague. They asked us to rewrite. Too
5 difficult for the assigned grade level.
6 Some felt that some of the eligible
7 content was not necessary, to delete it. The level
8 of difficulty should be lowered. Again, another
9 rewrite. And there were concerns about the
10 quantity of writing in grade three.
11 So, those are the 30,000-foot overview
12 of the comments.
13 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: What are you
14 doing moving forward with those comments? Are you
15 adopting some? What process have you set up to
16 discuss those?
17 MS. PEREZ: So, we’re taking a look at
18 all those comments and having some internal
19 discussions on how we want to move forward with
20 addressing those. Yeah.
21 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: It’s
22 interesting. I had a teacher, she’s retiring, and
23 she came to just discuss kind of academic standards
24 and testing. And, generally, very supportive of
25 the academic standards, appreciated that we’re 24
1 moving to more rigorous standards.
2 One of the questions, though, had to do
3 with the testing. Specifically the questions on
4 the test were not grade level -- really set for
5 that grade level. She was a third grade teacher.
6 A lot of it was -- were specifically questions on
7 the test were very difficult for those kids to
8 understand, moving forward. And she pulled out her
9 packet of just booklets for testing that third
10 graders require, and it was quite a spread of test
11 questions.
12 Is there any plans, moving forward, to
13 try to kind of move back to teaching as a
14 profession instead of driving toward just worrying
15 about performance on tests and trying to maybe
16 relay some burdens within the classroom on testing?
17 MS. PEREZ: In our profession, we
18 really work towards teaching in a consistent
19 manner, and we’ve had standards in the effect for
20 many, many years. So, what we ask is that our
21 teachers teach to the standards. And, in effect,
22 the standards are tested on the test.
23 So, if our teachers are teaching to the
24 standards, the students should perform well on the
25 test. 25
1 We have new standards, and we have new
2 tests. Change, implementation takes some time.
3 We did have some concerns about some of
4 the sample test questions that were on the eligible
5 content sites, and we’re also taking a look at
6 those and trying to build in some supports on our
7 SAS portal to help teachers understand what we call
8 depth of knowledge that is required for those
9 tests, in particular in mathematics.
10 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Can you just
11 give the difference between academic standards and
12 curriculum? I know there’s some confusion out
13 there on those two terminologies and sometimes
14 people use them intertwined.
15 MS. PEREZ: Sure. Academic standard
16 set the bar, the minimum, of where we want to be.
17 Local school districts write their curriculum to
18 help achieve those minimum standards. So, the
19 curriculum is really what is taught in the
20 classroom, and that’s dictated at the local level.
21 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: And we are a
22 non-dictate curriculum state; correct?
23 MS. PEREZ: Correct.
24 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Can you walk the
25 committee through the connection with our No Child 26
1 Left Behind waiver, what it means if we lose that
2 and how that’s connected with academic standards
3 and testing?
4 MS. PEREZ: Maybe, Rich, could you try
5 to address that question a little bit for us?
6 MR. MARASCHIELLO: I mean, if we -- I
7 think the bottom line is it’s a funding issue.
8 It’s the federal Title I dollars that are attached
9 to it. And I don’t know whether there is some
10 relief, you know, that can be negotiated. I think
11 it’s mostly coming down to dollars.
12 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Can you, and
13 maybe if you don’t have it now, provide the
14 committee specifically what happens if we lose the
15 No Child Left Behind waiver?
16 MR. MARASCHIELLO: I think that would
17 be the best approach, to get the details back to
18 you after that.
19 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: And the
20 connection with everybody we’ve kind of built to
21 date within education.
22 And one other question, special -- I
23 know this is a big deal for special ed students.
24 Are they given the exact same test as non-special
25 education students? And how do other states 27
1 differentiate between special ed student testing
2 and the general populous?
3 MR. MARASCHIELLO: Okay. So, we have
4 for the PSSA and the Keystones, we have an
5 alternate assessment. The PASA it’s called,
6 Pennsylvania -- what's it called? Pennsylvania
7 Alternate Assessment System, PASA versus -- talk
8 about acronyms. Anyway, that would be for the
9 severely disabled students whose IEP determines
10 that that would be the appropriate test.
11 For other special ed students, the IEP
12 may specify certain accommodations that should
13 accompany, you know, the administration of that
14 test, to make the test more appropriate for that
15 child.
16 So, there's accommodations on the
17 regular test and then there's an alternate test.
18 Was there another question?
19 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: No. Did good.
20 That's all I have.
21 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
22 Thank you very much for your testimony.
23 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
24 Representative Tobash.
25 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you, 28
1 Mr. Chairman.
2 I appreciate your thoughtful
3 testimony. We’ve heard from you before at various
4 hearings, and we appreciate your perspective as we
5 continue to roll this issue out to all -- everyone
6 in the commonwealth, because it’s really important
7 to everyone, our teachers, students, and
8 administrators.
9 Larry, you talked about feedback that
10 you’ve gotten through the process. What kind of
11 feedback are we getting now from educators and
12 administrators concerning the roll-out of the first
13 three Keystone Exams? And how is that changing the
14 course of the state board at forming policy and
15 changing regulation?
16 MR. WITTIG: Let me take my state board
17 hat off and put on my president of Tamaqua School
18 Board hat on, because that is -- that’s in the
19 trenches. Initially, when we proposed, you know,
20 the graduation requirement of proficiency,
21 everybody panics. What’s it going to cost? You
22 know, there were numbers thrown out there, six
23 hundred thousand dollars per -- all ridiculous
24 things. And in Tamaqua -- this is anecdotal, I
25 understand that, but it’s typical. Tamaqua is 29
1 typical. It falls right in the middle demographic
2 of the state’s five hundred districts. And we
3 looked at our prospective remediation, what it
4 would cost, and what we should have been doing all
5 along, by the way.
6 Now, remember, we’re -- I’m going to
7 differentiate a little bit on the PSSAs that are
8 administered in third, fifth, eighth grade as
9 opposed to the Keystones, which are course-ending
10 exams, at the end of the course, as opposed to the
11 eleventh grade PSSA, which is no longer going to be
12 in existence.
13 So, when we examined that, to your
14 question, we determined, in the initial year, it
15 would cost Tamaqua about thirty thousand dollars,
16 in the initial year. After that, it should break
17 even because we should have gotten our legs, and we
18 should have been doing this anyway.
19 If you would have been -- if you were
20 teaching in the three disciplines the way you
21 should have been, everybody’s going to be
22 remediated at some point. But that should be built
23 in. You don’t socially promote anymore. And
24 that’s the case, you see. If there’s a student
25 that’s on the cusp, it’s cheaper for a district to 30
1 just say: Go ahead. You’re not going to need
2 algebra I, you’re not going to need bio, really,
3 you are not going to do that. And, you know: Move
4 on .
5 And then they get to a college and they
6 have to be remediated. And that’s not anecdotal.
7 That is real-time stuff.
8 Tamaqua’s in a very good position with
9 regard to Lehigh Carbon Community College, where we
10 have a benefactor that allows the students to go
11 free for two years. No means test. If you
12 graduate from Tamaqua, you get two years community
13 college for nothing. All you have to do is be able
14 to do the work.
15 And in the initial time, this was about
16 ten years ago, the college came to -- and the
17 benefactor, by the way, came to the district and
18 said: By the way, we are paying for two years of
19 college, not two years of remediation. So either
20 your kids are going to be set when they get there,
21 or something’s going to have to change.
22 And that was an eye-opener for us. Oh,
23 what? We’re not doing a good job? Well,
24 apparently not.
25 This is the mandatory part, which you 31
1 asked me what we’re doing and based on the
2 feedback. The feedback, and I’m sure you’ll hear
3 some of the feedback after we leave, is that -
4 it’s cumbersome. It’s going to be terrible. It’s
5 not. I can argue about whether biology is
6 relevant. But you need a science for NCLB, okay,
7 so pick your science. Physics? Organics? You
8 know, biology, at a basic level is what it is.
9 And so I don’t think, from a Tamaqua
10 perspective, that it’s going to be burdensome on
11 other districts. And if it is and if it’s more
12 than 10 percent of their population are going to
13 need waivers, then I think their local school
14 boards have a problem and they maybe should address
15 it. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
16 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: So, listen, I
17 appreciate the fact that you’re bringing your real-
18 world experience with Tamaqua School District, as
19 you have characterized this as kind of a median
20 school district in many respects. I mean,
21 certainly within this commonwealth, we’ve got
22 diverse school districts. We’ve got some with far
23 lower income levels and some with far higher income
24 levels.
25 MR. WITTIG: Not too many further lower 32
1 than Tamaqua, by the way.
2 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Well, when you
3 talk about Tamaqua as, you know, kind of in the
4 middle of the spectrum of school districts, I
5 think, when you’re developing standards, certainly
6 if you develop towards the middle, you know you’ve
7 got a lot of outliers on either side of that, and
8 it is very difficult with the diversity in
9 Pennsylvania to have one set of standards that
10 really works in our lowest performing school
11 districts and our highest performing school
12 districts, especially if your perspective is from
13 the middle.
14 So now you’ve mentioned the fact that
15 No Child Left Behind requirement is fulfilled by
16 the first three Keystone Exams; is that correct?
17 MR. WITTIG: Correct, yes.
18 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: And what about
19 the graduation requirement? Is that also a No
20 Child Left Behind requirement?
21 MR. WITTIG: No, but it’s -- it’s a
22 requirement for an assessment that is brand new to
23 Pennsylvania for teachers and administrators, which
24 is revolutionary. Instead of the old Debbie (ph)
25 form, where it’s satisfactory -- I’m being kind by 33
1 saying unsatisfactory, but the threshold is
2 extremely low.
3 So, now there’s four criteria, and
4 that’s measured -- 50 percent of it is measured by
5 student performance. And you and I have had this
6 conversation, that -- that the buy-in of the
7 student by virtue of having a graduation
8 requirement -- and let’s face it, look, nobody -
9 this is a double negative here -- nobody is going
10 to not graduate because of this. No one.
11 If you look down the line, test one,
12 test two, project-based assessment, waiver, and
13 then more than ten percent, you go to the
14 department. That’s a stretch. So, when people
15 raise their hand and say, you know, My child’s not
16 going to graduate because of this -- I had a parent
17 come up to me in Radnor and saying, you know: You
18 are ruining my child’s life because they have an
19 IEP and they can’t pass the biology exam.
20 I said: That’s not the state. That is
21 your local IEP team that determines whether it’s
22 mandatory or not.
23 And they said: Well, they say it’s the
24 state.
25 Well, they’re not telling you the 34
1 truth. It's the local IEP team that determines
2 whether IEP students must pass that or not.
3 So, to your question of reach
4 districts, poor districts, and one set of
5 standards. We had a group come to the state board
6 years ago that -- and there was a lot of very dry
7 presentations to the state board, but this one
8 particularly stuck in my head, and it was a group
9 out of Washington D.C. that did a study of
10 performance of minority -- majority, minority
11 school districts, poverty, ESL, all of the criteria
12 that you would typify as low performing. And the
13 results were predictable in a grid, except for some
14 of these outliers up here. Ninety-five percent
15 poverty, 95 percent minority, and they're
16 outperforming everybody else.
17 So, I asked the naive question: Why?
18 How can they do it?
19 They said: Well, it's teachers and
20 administrators working together collaboratively, in
21 a positive way, and expect, expect high performance
22 from all their students.
23 So, I am not going to write off
24 students from poor district or minority districts
25 just because they are there. I think that every 35
1 student, unless they are identified, has potential
2 of having a proficiency on these exams. And we
3 need to not ignore them or not say: You know what,
4 it’s okay. It’s all right. We understand your
5 plight.
6 That’s not what we’re about. We’re
7 about trying to raise everybody’s standards, and
8 have all students have the opportunity to go to
9 college without being remediated.
10 MR. MARASCHIELLO: If I can add to
11 Mr. Wittig, what he was saying -- excuse me -
12 about biology. The percentage of students who were
13 proficient or advanced on the grade eleven science
14 test when there were not consequences for students,
15 in 2011, was 40 percent, 40.8; in 2012, was 41.8.
16 When we switched to the Keystones in
17 2013 for grade eleven, when we count it for
18 accountability, the percent jumped to 45 percent on
19 the biology Keystone versus the 40. And in 2014,
20 the number jumped to 54 percent.
21 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: I understand
22 that. And it’s been my experience with talking to
23 administrators and educators, that these Keystone
24 Exams are better than the PSSAs that they
25 replaced. I think there’s no question about that. 36
1 And I believe that there’s some validity to having
2 them as a graduation requirement, but I think it
3 ought to be up -- there should be some autonomy
4 within these different school districts because
5 they’re very varied.
6 My question was -- and I know we got
7 into a long answer, and for brevity here we need to
8 try to get through this hearing, we’ve got many
9 but the fact of the matter is a
10 graduation requirement is not required by No Child
11 Left Behind law. Is that correct?
12 And you’ve made some linkage here
13 between the teacher evaluation law that we passed
14 in the last session and the requirement. But,
15 again, look, again, I give a little bit more
16 credit, I think, to our educators. They’ve got to
17 get in front of students, and they’ve got to teach
18 them, and they’ve got to have them want to continue
19 to learn and do well on these exams. So, I think
20 the teachers are graded by their ability to get
21 through to kids. If they can get through to kids,
22 they’re going to do well in the exams and they’ll
23 be graded as such. The requirement, in my opinion,
24 doesn’t really add more credibility to the teacher
25 evaluation system. 37
1 REPRESENTATIVE HILL: Mr. Chairman, if
2 I might, the example that you gave was the biology
3 Keystone Exam. I, too, was a local school board
4 director. My opinion and my personal experience
5 probably differs from yours, and I think I actually
6 came from an exceptional school district. Very
7 proud of what we did.
8 One of the things that, Mr. Tobash, I’d
9 like to help clarify with your example, is that
10 when that Keystone for biology was pushed out, many
11 school districts have what would be considered a
12 traditional biology curriculum. When that first
13 exam was administered, those students weren’t
14 instructed in the curriculum that was used to
15 create that test. That biology Keystone has a
16 greater emphasis on biochemistries than the vast
17 majority of public schools taught in a traditional
18 biology course.
19 So, the reason that we saw that great
20 increase in those scores and in those results is
21 that, you know, the first time it was administered,
22 my older son, who is a better student than my
23 younger son, was proficient. My second one came
24 along, because he had been instructed in the
25 curriculum that was aligned to the test, was 38
1 advanced.
2 So, I don’t think that’s really a very
3 accurate example to give in the situation with
4 regard to the question that Mr. Tobash asked.
5 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: We’re going
7 to continue.
8 Representative Longietti, would you
9 please?
10 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: Thank you,
11 Mr. Chairman.
12 And thank you all for all of your
13 efforts and your time here this morning as well.
14 Just to explore a couple questions.
15 You know, when I talk to teachers and
16 administrators in the field, are there any concerns
17 that there’s so much focus -- and I understand the
18 importance of the standards -- but there’s so much
19 focus on the standards content and so much focus on
20 the assessment process that we are perhaps crowding
21 out other content area that is vitally important
22 and/or that we are taking away from higher order
23 thinking skills because we are so focused on
24 assessment. Any sense of that? Any reaction to
25 that? 39
1 MS. MOLCHANOW: When the board began
2 discussing revisions to Chapter 4 back in 2012, we
3 initially had a proposal to scale back to only
4 three Keystone Exams in algebra I, biology, and
5 literature, and we did hear feedback from educators
6 as well as members of the general assembly at that
7 time that we should retain an additional Keystone
8 Exam in composition, and we should retain an
9 additional Keystone Exam in the social sciences,
10 which was focused on civics and government to
11 address the issue that you raised.
12 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: I know. I
13 just hear that theme. It’s almost like the world
14 ends at a certain point in the school calendar and
15 all the energy and all the focus is on preparation
16 for the assessment. And that teachers and
17 administrators get frustrated that they can’t get
18 to some other things that they think are
19 important.
20 What about -- have we looked at -- and
21 I know we’re hamstrung. We’ve got No Child Left
22 Behind standards. Those are federal. But have we
23 looked at what other countries that are successful
24 are doing? Are they as focused as we are, it seems
25 like, in the United States of America, on 40
1 assessment? What are they doing differently?
2 MR. WITTIG: Everyone looks at Finland
3 as this model. And Finland’s about the size of
4 Atlanta in terms of population. They get together
5 in a room and say, Let’s do this, and they do it.
6 United States is a — a tad different
7 in terms of demographics and mix, and it’s much
8 more difficult to be unified in one -- you know,
9 we’re making standards, as Representative Tobash
10 said, for everyone within large, you know, diverse
11 backgrounds, and ethnic and cultural.
12 So, with regard to your question, we
13 need to look at the big picture and say, you don’t
14 want to inhibit growth in any other content areas,
15 but yet you have to close the gap between what
16 truly proficiency is and what graduation is, so
17 that a diploma from Tamaqua means the same thing as
18 a diploma from TE or any place else. And that is
19 what sort of the crux of the argument is now.
20 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: I know that,
21 you know, Marc Tucker, in his book Surpassing
22 Shanghai, looks at quite a number of countries,
23 including Canada, our neighbor to the north, and
24 indicates that Canada, overall, has done a better
25 job at least in -- in student performance, and that 41
1 we can learn some things, perhaps, from them and
2 take them down to the state level.
3 Last question, the world of unintended
4 consequences, and I'm just curious as to whether or
5 not you have seen this. It has come to me from a
6 former superintendent. As we know, we would like
7 children to excel at earlier grades as much as
8 possible, take rigor at those early grades. And so
9 some students, obviously, can take algebra I in
10 eighth grade, and in some school districts eighth
11 grade is a middle school configuration.
12 The problem becomes that if advanced
13 students take the Keystone Exam for algebra I in
14 eighth grade and do well, when they come up to
15 ninth grade, obviously they're not going to repeat
16 that. They've already taken it; they've already
17 passed it. They've scored advanced, what-have-you.
18 So, now the subset of kids that are left to take
19 algebra I in high school, if you have a high school
20 configuration at ninth grade, are kids perhaps that
21 are not as advanced. And so, when they take the
22 Keystone Exam as a subset, they perhaps don't score
23 as well.
24 As I understand it, all that gets
25 counted -- all that, not -- the eighth grade 42
1 doesn’t, but the ninth grader get counted into the
2 school performance profile. And so, as a result,
3 unfortunately, there are some school districts that
4 are saying, no more algebra I in eighth grade,
5 because if advanced kids take it in ninth grade and
6 it gets counted into the high school school
7 performance profile, then it’s a better looking
8 profile for the high school. But if they take it
9 in eighth grade, then it’s a, perhaps, not as good
10 result in the school performance profile.
11 Have you seen that problem? I’m
12 concerned about that problem, because I’m hearing
13 it’s more than one school districts.
14 MR. MARASCHIELLO: I -- the eighth
15 grade algebra I scores are banked to when the
16 student gets to grade eleven high school for that
17 piece of the school performance profile.
18 For the teacher’s personal evaluation
19 and the growth for that teacher, that would count
20 at eighth grade, because it’s that teacher’s growth
21 that’s being calculated based on her -- that
22 experience with that class.
23 So, test scores are counted in
24 different places in the school performance
25 profile. 43
1 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: My
2 understanding is that -- and maybe I misunderstand
3 but -- is that they’re banked for some purposes for
4 eleventh grade, under No Child Left Behind, but
5 they’re not banked and counted immediately for
6 other purposes. And those other purposes are
7 discouraging school districts from offering algebra
8 I in eighth grade, which is a horrible result. We
9 want kids that are ready to take it, to take it
10 when they’re younger so they can continue to
11 advance. At least some school districts are making
12 a decision no more algebra I in eighth grade.
13 We’ll wait until they get to the high school.
14 MR. MARASCHIELLO: What we can do and
15 prepare for you is a listing of all the places
16 where test scores are counted and the relative
17 weight they have where they’re counted so you can
18 see the impact.
19 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: The
20 information came to me from a former superintendent
21 whose daughter is a teacher in the school
22 district.
23 Thank you.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
25 Representative Rapp. 44
1 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you,
2 Mr. Chairman.
3 And thank you, Mr. Wittig and the rest
4 of the panel. I found this very informative.
5 I have a question that probably has
6 three components, if you don’t mind. I wondered if
7 you could give me and us a little bit more
8 information about the Classroom Diagnostic Tools
9 and the Voluntary Model Curriculum. And then how
10 many times a student can actually retest, what the
11 cost of that is to a district. Is there a cost to
12 them? And the last one -- I know others probably
13 have questions -- is -- is the completion of a
14 project in lieu of the test, is that something
15 that’s solely developed by the local education
16 agency, or is that something that the state has a
17 standard for?
18 MR. MARASCHIELLO: The Classroom
19 Diagnostic Tools are provided free to districts.
20 It’s an online diagnostic assessment that teachers
21 can use multiple times during the year to track
22 progress of their students.
23 As I said earlier, they get immediate
24 feedback and links to instructional supports for
25 each of the diagnostic areas that are assessed. 45
1 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: So, if -- oh, I’m
2 sorry. If I could just interrupt you a minute.
3 So, if a child is lacking in
4 proficiency in reading, let’s say, and that -- not
5 knowing what is in this diagnostic tool, is that
6 child then going to receive some remedial
7 instruction in reading to become more -- to help
8 that child be more proficient in reading through
9 this diagnostic tool and the instruction?
10 MR. MARASCHIELLO: Right. So, it’s
11 actually -- within reading, it would point out,
12 within the categories that are assessed within
13 reading, where the areas of strength and need are.
14 And, yes, the intent is then the teacher, working
15 with the student, look at their data and form a
16 plan moving forward.
17 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: And how many
18 times will the student be permitted to retest?
19 MR. MARASCHIELLO: On the -- on the
20 diagnostic tool?
21 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Yes, if they -
22 MR. MARASCHIELLO: That’s a local
23 decision. Up to five times a year is the maximum
24 we recommend. You provide enough time for
25 instruction between assessments so it would have an 46
1 impact. It’s a local decision.
2 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: So, if a child
3 repeatedly takes or goes through this diagnostic
4 tool and still is not proficient, is then when the
5 administrator would step in and say: We’ve done
6 all we can. We’re going to give a waiver. Or
7 then: We’re going to look at the completion of a
8 project. Would that be totally up to the
9 administrator?
10 MR. MARASCHIELLO: Right. The waiver
11 is not related to the diagnosis tools. It’s
12 related to the Keystone Exams.
13 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: And I’m saying -
14 right. If they can’t pass the Keystone Exam, and
15 they’ve gone through all of the -
16 MR. MARASCHIELLO: Supplemental
17 instruction.
18 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Yes.
19 MR. MARASCHIELLO: And they met -- and
20 they would have to have met all other local
21 requirements, and then the decision about the
22 waiver is a local decision.
23 MS. MOLCHANOW: And in terms of
24 retesting, Chapter 4 requires two attempts at the
25 Keystone Exam before a student could enter the 47
1 project-based assessment, with supplemental
2 instruction being provided to the student between
3 those two administrations of the exam.
4 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: And that is
5 actual instruction? It’s not just a student
6 sitting in front of a computer. It’s interaction
7 with a teacher?
8 MS. MOLCHANOW: The completion of
9 satisfactory supplemental instruction is designed
10 by the district and is at the discretion of the
11 school district.
12 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: So, it can be
13 just a student sitting in front of a computer,
14 instead of an instructor?
15 MS. MOLCHANOW: It’s a local decision,
16 via Chapter 4.
17 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: So, I assume that
18 is yes.
19 Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
21 Representative Truitt.
22 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
23 Mr. Chairman.
24 Thank you to all of you for your
25 testimony today. I have just two questions, and 48
1 one of them is a short-answer type.
2 I was curious if you have any -- you
3 mentioned some numbers about the -- in 2013, the
4 number that had passed or failed or had scored
5 proficient or better on the biology exam, what -
6 for the latest school year available, what
7 percentage of students successfully, statewide,
8 scored proficient or advanced on these tests?
9 MR. MARASCHIELLO: I do have those.
10 So, you want the most recent year?
11 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Yes.
12 MR. MARASCHIELLO: On mathematics and
13 algebra I, it's 64 percent, grade eleven. We're
14 talking about grade eleven students. And reading
15 and literature, it was 74 percent. And as I said
16 earlier, biology was 54 percent.
17 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you.
18 And my second question is, understand
19 that I'm a control systems engineer. I believe
20 heavily in feedback loops. I'm curious to know
21 what the department or the board has done in terms
22 of finding out why students are failing these
23 tests, or if you have an educated opinion as to why
24 they failed the test. Is the problem the tests,
25 the teacher, the curriculum, the standards? Where 49
1 do you think the problem lies that such a, frankly,
2 huge percentage of our students are failing the
3 tests?
4 MS. PEREZ: Representative, one of the
5 things that we do at the department is we have
6 conversations with superintendents. So, when our
7 school performance profile became public last
8 September -- September, October, we engaged
9 superintendents across the commonwealth in
10 conversation to talk about their scores and what
11 they thought was the reason their scores were what
12 they were, be it they went up or down or maybe
13 stayed the same.
14 To a superintendent that I spoke with
15 and many of my colleagues spoke with, they believe
16 that especially positive impact on their scores was
17 related to the tight alignment of the curriculum
18 with the standards as well as, then, the fidelity
19 that the teachers were teaching in the classroom to
20 the standards.
21 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: I’m trying to
22 invert that now. So, what does that mean about
23 when they -- when the students fail? What is the
24 most likely reason that they failed?
25 MS. PEREZ: The superintendents believe 50
1 that students were not successful on the Keystone
2 Exams for -- there were maybe a number of reasons,
3 but one of those reasons may have been the — the
4 curriculum was not being as -- implemented as well
5 as it could have been in the classroom, and this is
6 part of the change process. The superintendents
7 were going back and looking to see where they
8 needed to do additional professional development
9 with teachers, maybe investigate some more data
10 analysis, to drill down into where students were
11 having misconceptions with the content so that they
12 could be retaught.
13 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: I’m delighted
14 to hear you do have that feedback loop in place.
15 Thank you.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
17 Representative Gillian.
18 REPRESENTATIVE GILLEN: Thank you,
19 Mr. Chairman.
20 Just as very brief follow-up. The
21 school administrator or chief school administrator,
22 I think I heard in the testimony here, at their
23 sole discretion, could waive those state
24 requirements in terms of proficiencies on the
25 Keystone. And I believe I heard in the testimony 51
1 the phrase "good cause” would have to be present.
2 Could you help me, definitionally, with what that
3 good cause would be for the 10 percent?
4 MS. PEREZ: Yeah. So, the good cause
5 would be the extenuating circumstances potentially
6 related to individual student illness, there was
7 some sort of tragedy that happened with the student
8 that they were not able to attempt the test, or
9 some other good local cause. It’s all done on a
10 case-by-case basis, so the superintendent would
11 have to evaluate each student and determine locally
12 in their context what good cause was.
13 REPRESENTATIVE GILLEN: You mentioned
14 some exceptional circumstances in that individual’s
15 personal life, but could you delve a little bit
16 more into academics? They weren’t up to speed?
17 They weren’t working hard enough at it?
18 I mean, is there a lot of latitude
19 here? You seem to define some exceptional
20 circumstances.
21 MS. PEREZ: So, I don’t know that I
22 could go into every exceptional circumstance
23 because I don’t know what those would be, but what
24 I can tell you is that we have a threshold of 10
25 percent that the chief school administrator has 52
1 latitude at the local level to make that decision
2 in discretion. If they go above that 10 percent,
3 then they have to provide the department with an
4 action plan that would address those exceptional
5 situations and help remediate students so that they
6 do become proficient.
7 REPRESENTATIVE GILLEN: Does the
8 department have a window at which to make a
9 decision as to whether they’re going to accept that
10 action plan or not?
11 MS. PEREZ: I believe we talk about ten
12 days prior to graduation the plan must be submitted
13 to the secretary.
14 REPRESENTATIVE GILLEN: Right. That’s
15 on the one side. Yes. But does the Pennsylvania
16 Department of Education have a response time? Is
17 there a window that they must respond in?
18 MS. PEREZ: I don’t have that time line
19 handy. I don’t know if we have that in the
20 regulation. We can get that to you, though.
21 REPRESENTATIVE GILLEN: Okay. That
22 would be fine.
23 Just a comment in closing, the Business
24 Insider, in looking at Finland and their success,
25 specifically said that their success allied in 53
1 going against the evaluation-driven central model
2 that much of the western world’s education system
3 utilized.
4 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
5 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
6 Representative Carroll.
7 REPRESENTATIVE CARROLL: Thank you,
8 Mr. Chairman.
9 Not really a question for the panel,
10 but just sitting here listening to the dialogue, as
11 a parent with two students in a public high school,
12 one recently graduated, I applaud an effort to
13 raise the standards. The reality is that our
14 students need to be challenged more by our public
15 schools.
16 That challenge will result in better
17 scores on tests that really matter, and they’re
18 called the SAT and the ACT. In the world of public
19 education, in my view, we must challenge these
20 students more. And by challenging them more, I’m
21 far less concerned about what they got in their
22 second year in high school in the third quarter.
23 I’m far more concerned with how well they did on
24 the ACT or the SAT.
25 And so, from my perspective as a 54
1 parent, I applaud an effort to raise the bar here.
2 We must raise the bar in an effort to try and
3 enhance the educational experience of the kids in
4 our public school.
5 I’ll stop there and say thank you.
6 Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the
7 opportunity.
8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Very good.
9 I want to thank the testifiers and any of the
10 information that you need to forward, forward to
11 the chairmen, and we will make sure it the get
12 disseminated to all the members of the committee.
13 And thank you again for your testimony
14 today.
15 Next we have testifying is Jerry
16 Oleksiak -- Jerry, I apologize. I’m so used to
17 calling you Jerry, I haven’t had to say your last
18 name for all these years. He’s vice president of
19 the PSEA, and also Jake Miller, who is our social
20 studies teacher at Good Hope Middle School at
21 Cumberland Valley School District.
22 Jerry, how bad did I butcher your name?
23 MR. OLEKSIAK: Not as badly as some.
24 You’re basic. You’re not proficient or advanced.
25 We’ll get you there. 55
1 Good morning, Chairman Saylor and other
2 members of the House Education Committee. My name
3 is Jerry Oleksiak, and for more than thirty years I
4 was in the classroom as a special education
5 teacher, primarily in the Upper Merion Area School
6 District and in the Montgomery County Intermediate
7 Unit and Bucks County Intermediate Unit.
8 Currently I have the honor of serving
9 as the vice president of the Pennsylvania State
10 Education Association, PSEA.
11 I'm here today to speak on behalf of
12 PSEA's 180,000 members who work every day to help
13 students achieve. I'm particularly pleased to
14 share our members' thoughts on two issues that have
15 profound impact on their practice and on their
16 student's learning: standard and assessments, both
17 of which are addressed in House Bills 168 and 177.
18 I appreciate your attention to these important
19 issues, and thank you for inviting us here today.
20 PSEA appreciates the efforts of
21 Representative Grove and House Bill 177's
22 co-sponsors to support challenging academic
23 standards for Pennsylvania's students. The bill
24 stems from a belief that high standards are
25 important to support effective teaching and 56
1 learning. As educators, as members of PSEA, we
2 share that belief.
3 PSEA is concerned, however, that the
4 approach proposed in House Bill 177 runs the risk
5 of diverting more resources away from teaching and
6 learning by perpetuating the uncertainty we’ve
7 already faced about our academic targets. Academic
8 standards are particularly critical because they
9 are the foundation on which all curricula,
10 instruction, and academic programming are built.
11 And therein lies the rub. Because standards are
12 the foundation, instability in the standards
13 results in delay and confusion in the design of
14 curriculum, the delivery of instruction, and the
15 ways we hold school professionals accountable for
16 teaching and learning.
17 Shifting standards, of course, impacts
18 our students. Each time standards change,
19 educators need to realign curricula to the new
20 requirements. Sometimes this means that key
21 components of the standards shift from one grade
22 level to the next. As students move through the
23 K-12 system, they rely on a seamless learning
24 progression that builds from year to year. As
25 standards change and key components move across the 57
1 curriculum to different grades, students who are
2 caught in the middle of the change run the risk of
3 missing important content or having content
4 repeated unnecessarily.
5 Educators and school districts have
6 invested substantial effort and resources to
7 implement the Pennsylvania Core Standards. These
8 investments include purchasing new instructional
9 materials, allotting staff time to align curriculum
10 to the new standards, developing new common
11 assessments, and providing professional development
12 to educators on how to deliver the standards-
13 aligned instruction.
14 PSEA is concerned that initiating
15 another process to study the standards sends yet
16 another signal to educators that the foundation of
17 education in the commonwealth is still shifting,
18 and so it is not yet safe to build. In practical
19 terms, convening a commission to consider changing
20 Pennsylvania’s standards again sends a clear
21 message to districts to stop and wait, as they have
22 several times over the past several years.
23 Educators can’t afford to engage in a process of
24 continual curricular redesign; they can’t keep
25 trying to hit a moving target. 58
1 With limited resources, districts will
2 stop planned improvements and wait to see if the
3 initiatives they planned will stand solidly on a
4 new foundation. Stability, on the other hand,
5 allows school districts to develop curriculum,
6 design and deliver instruction and assess students
7 with some confidence that they will be aligned to
8 the standards.
9 It is very difficult to design a
10 coherent system when the target is constantly
11 shifting or might shift.
12 PSEA recommends that the energy that
13 would be targeted toward considering another
14 standards redesign be focused on ensuring
15 successful implementation of the existing
16 standards. After five years of investing in
17 change, our schools need time to build on a stable
18 foundation.
19 House Bill 168, on the other hand,
20 provides a promising approach to return graduation
21 decisions to local educators who know students
22 best. The Chapter 4 regulations advanced by the
23 Corbett Administration and enacted in March 2014
24 replaced a carefully crafted 2009 compromise that
25 some members of this committee, including the 59
1 chairman, played an integral role in establishing.
2 This compromise required multiple measures of
3 student performance to determine graduation.
4 House Bill 168 would reduce the
5 importance of the results of one test given on one
6 day and help return balance to instruction. PSEA
7 represents the efforts of Representative Tobash and
8 others on the committee who are working to
9 eliminate the use of Keystone Exams as a
10 high-stakes graduation requirement. PSEA
11 wholeheartedly endorses this idea and urges the
12 House Education committee to approve the bill.
13 I want to go off script for a minute
14 and respond to one thing that I heard in the
15 previous testimony.
16 Our teachers were part of creating the
17 cut scores for the Keystone Exams. At this point
18 in the process, the Keystone Exams were end-of-
19 course exams and were not designed to be graduation
20 exit exams. And I think the process and the input
21 that our teachers provided would have been
22 different had they known that they were going to be
23 graduation exit exams and not end-of-course exams.
24 For years, PSEA has maintained that it
25 is inappropriate to base high school graduation 60
1 decisions on state test results rather than on a
2 comprehensive review of student knowledge and
3 skills as reflected in the complete academic record
4 of a student over the course of his or her academic
5 career. Research backs up our assertion that
6 attaching high stakes to a state test has negative
7 consequences for students.
8 High-stakes exit exams -- and we’ve
9 provided the research to the committee -- are
10 associated with increased dropout rates, narrowed
11 curricula, decreases in student motivation to
12 learn, and disproportionate harm to some of our
13 most vulnerable students, who are the students I
14 worked with over the course of my career, those
15 living in poverty, minority students, English
16 language learners, and special needs students.
17 In states with high-stakes exit exams,
18 students are retained at higher rates in the grades
19 preceding state test administration. The fact is
20 that high-stakes graduation exams divert scarce
21 resources from standards-based instruction and a
22 full, rich curriculum to test prep and remediation.
23 They can trap students in remediation even if the
24 students pass all required courses and earn all
25 credits for graduation that have been established 61
1 by the local school district.
2 Remediation during the school day means
3 that some students need to drop electives in music
4 and art, which sometimes are the content areas that
5 keep students most engaged in school. Teachers’
6 time is diverted from standards-based instruction
7 to test remediation.
8 Some proponents of the use of Keystone
9 Exams as graduation requirements will tell you that
10 the Keystones are not actually high-stakes exit
11 exams, because students can retake the exams or
12 perform a project-based assessment. As a last
13 resort, a school superintendent can even waive the
14 testing requirement and allow students to graduate
15 after a student has failed the exam twice and also
16 failed the project-based assessment.
17 It’s true that a student can graduate
18 in this manner, but pursuing this path to a diploma
19 requires students to fail state assessments three
20 times, requires schools to provide test
21 remediation, even to students who successfully
22 passed the requisite course work, often requires
23 students to drop electives in favor of test prep
24 classes, and diverts teachers away from delivering
25 a complete curriculum and toward test prep during 62
1 class time.
2 Educators are professionals. They know
3 their students well. They know their students'
4 strengths and weaknesses. They know which students
5 freeze on a standardize test but can give content-
6 rich presentations in class. They know which
7 students have innate leadership skills, which
8 students struggle to do their best work in the
9 morning but shine by afternoon, and which students
10 collaborate exceptionally well in groups. Teachers
11 also know whether or not students are proficient in
12 biology, algebra or literature.
13 Local school leaders know what the
14 local community expects of their schools.
15 Maintaining high standards at the state level while
16 returning graduation decisions to the local level
17 is an important step in helping all students
18 achieve.
19 Thank you for the opportunity to
20 present these comments on House Bills 168 and 177.
21 And you're going to hear from Jake in a
22 minute, and then we'll be happy to answer any
23 questions. Thank you.
24 MR. MILLER: Good morning, Chairman
25 Saylor and members of the House Education 63
1 Committee. My name is Jake Miller, and I currently
2 serve as seventh grade United States history
3 teacher in the Cumberland Valley School District.
4 I appreciate the opportunity to provide firsthand
5 field-based testimony on House Bill 168 and 177.
6 Thank you for your attention to the issues
7 surrounding Keystone Exams and the PA Core
8 Standards, and thank you for inviting me here
9 today.
10 Beginning with my high school
11 graduating class of 2001, the commonwealth of
12 Pennsylvania has instituted several shifts in
13 policy regarding graduation requirements. My class
14 was the first to be incorporated with what was
15 called a graduation project, which has since come
16 and gone. The following graduating class was the
17 first to have to complete the PSSA. Since then,
18 we’ve continued to increase the measures for
19 students to receive their diploma, up to and
20 including today’s Keystone Exams.
21 As Mr. Oleksiak stated before me, we
22 are not opposed to assessment. We are teachers.
23 We’re the ones who created the first tests. Heck,
24 my students are currently taking a quiz in their
25 third period class as we speak right now. 64
1 What we have issues with is basing a
2 student’s entire academic career on three, and
3 possibly five, different standardized tests.
4 At Cumberland Valley High School, many
5 of my colleagues led the way by piloting the
6 Keystone Exams a few years ago. Since they are so
7 experienced with administering them, they have some
8 pretty strong feelings on the subject, so I decided
9 to survey them.
10 Only 12 percent of the teachers
11 surveyed supported the Keystone Exams. A full 83
12 percent oppose them. Half of the respondents
13 strongly oppose. And just as a side note, in case
14 your wondering why that doesn’t add up to 100
15 percent, 5 percent were of the "no opinion”
16 category. Some 67 percent stated that the Keystone
17 Exams are just more bureaucratic red tape. Ninety-
18 two percent believe there are more pressing
19 educational issues for the legislature than adding
20 more Keystone Exams.
21 While 83 percent of teachers oppose the
22 current Keystone Exams, an astounding 94 percent
23 oppose adding additional ones.
24 Some issues my colleagues raised
25 regarding the Keystone Exams in that survey were 65
1 that they do not accommodate students with learning
2 disabilities. And off the record — or, excuse me,
3 just to sidetrack for a second, when PDE was up
4 here to talk about students with learning
5 disabilities taking the PASA, that’s a very small
6 amount of students who take that. I would say in
7 my middle school of a thousand, I would say it’s
8 less than fifteen.
9 Similarly, they severely limit students
10 who plan to enter the work force, rather than
11 attend college. Again, these are my colleagues’
12 words. Standardized tests offer a quick and easy,
13 although by no means accurate, way to chart student
14 progress. What legitimacy, we question, is there
15 to the Keystone Exam? Could you or I pass the
16 Keystone Exam in biology? I’m not so sure.
17 One thing that makes America so great
18 and so cutting-edge, innovative, and
19 entrepreneurial is our inclination to curiosity and
20 inquiry. Standardized testing thwarts that.
21 To the general public, challenging
22 standards and data behind them should seem like
23 good things. It is also fair - and fundamental -
24 to expect students to be proficient in biology,
25 algebra, and literature. Many students across the 66
1 commonwealth, my seventh grade students included,
2 will do fine on the Keystone Exams.
3 But to the student who fails these
4 exams, the fallout can be absolutely awful. At our
5 school, at Cumberland Valley High School, as is
6 true of schools across the commonwealth, those who
7 fail the Keystone are placed in remedial courses to
8 ensure that they will pass the exam. This course
9 has them complete the same rote learning over and
10 again to master the areas they failed in last
11 year’s exam. Oftentimes, this remedial course
12 comes at the expense of elective courses, as
13 Jerry’s previously stated, art and music; but also
14 technology education; agriculture program, which we
15 have an incredible one at Cumberland Valley High
16 School; engineering, which is growing, and more,
17 just so the student can retake their science,
18 mathematics, and/or literature course tethered to
19 the Keystone Exam. It goes without saying that, to
20 the average teenager, this is nothing short of
21 punishment.
22 From what I’ve gathered at my district,
23 the amount of students who continue in the remedial
24 courses are dwindling each year. The principals
25 have said that these high-risk students failing the 67
1 high-stakes exams are beginning to drop out.
2 The impact can also be felt by students
3 who pass the Keystone Exams. How, you might ask?
4 At Cumberland Valley High School, the increased
5 need for remedial courses may soon come at the
6 expense of non-Keystone Exam courses that can
7 define careers. Some of those being considered on
8 the chopping block are bio-chemistry and anatomy &
9 physiology. These two courses may drive students
10 to careers, those in the health field, but these
11 courses and others, like social studies, may also
12 no longer be offered by school districts.
13 And, again, just a side note, the
14 Pennsylvania Department of Education talked about
15 social studies, wanting to add a Keystone Exam,
16 that is a big part, because we want to ensure that
17 our students are continuing to have good
18 citizenship in the schools, and having a social
19 studies exam with the current set-up, will be a way
20 to ensure that students do have good citizenship
21 and that we are teaching them about government and
22 our history.
23 This burden isn’t solely on the
24 students; it is also mounting within schools
25 implementing the Keystone Exams. Teachers’ 68
1 schedules have been reworked and class loads
2 increased. Based upon estimates solely at my
3 school, our district will be required to hire at
4 least two new teachers to help ease the burden
5 these added remedial classes have placed upon the
6 teaching schedule. This adds more costs to school
7 districts.
8 Likewise, the costs are also mounting
9 for the commonwealth. From what I’ve learned, the
10 Keystone State -- and this is from Morning Call -
11 the Keystone State will spend more than one hundred
12 sixty million dollars on the Keystone Exams. As a
13 teacher who has personally seen classrooms
14 overflowing with students, lacking proper
15 resources, teachers who are suffering emotional
16 turmoil from the stresses of the classroom, and
17 students who could use more direction, challenge,
18 and encouragement, I know that we all can agree
19 that one hundred sixty million dollars could be
20 more appropriately spent elsewhere.
21 I raise this concern because I struggle
22 to measure our return on this hefty investment.
23 More bureaucratic red tape? Less time for teachers
24 to teach worthwhile, inspired curriculum?
25 Administrators spending more time on statistics 69
1 than students? More frustrated, disheartened
2 students? That hardly seems like a worthwhile
3 expense.
4 I know many of the legislators in this
5 room are worried about both the financial future
6 and educational future of all our Pennsylvanians.
7 It is my humble opinion that the Keystone Exams
8 offer no realistic boost to either. If anything,
9 they are detrimental to our state coffers and our
10 students' and schools' success.
11 Indeed, from my perspective in the
12 field, high-stakes testing has been head over heels
13 more high risk than high reward.
14 For these reasons, like Mr. Oleksiak
15 previously stated, I appreciate the efforts of
16 Representative Tobash and others on this committee
17 who have voiced concerns about the use of
18 graduation exit exams. House Bill 168 would
19 eliminate the use of Keystone Exams as a graduation
20 requirement.
21 To borrow Mr. Oleksiak's words: We
22 both wholeheartedly endorse this idea and urge the
23 House Education Committee to approve the bill as
24 soon as possible.
25 Students are taking Keystone Exams this 70
1 year, and those scores are being banked for their
2 projected graduation in 2017. There is no need to
3 put these students through the stress of high-
4 stakes exams, and there is no need for school
5 districts to waste precious financial resources on
6 remediation for students who may simply have
7 trouble taking tests, had a bad day, or were
8 distracted by something going on in their lives.
9 We need to have high expectations for
10 our young people, no doubt, but we also have to use
11 common sense and make decisions about their future
12 using measures that are fair.
13 When I told my students, who are very
14 appropriately studying the foundations of American
15 government this week, that I was going to speak on
16 two pieces of legislation before the House
17 Education Committee, they were curious to know what
18 they referenced. When I shared that House Bill 168
19 discussed the Keystone Exams, they began to boo.
20 One student stayed behind to say that -- as a
21 seventh grade student, mind you — he was worried
22 that he might not graduate because he won’t be able
23 to pass the literature Keystone Exam because he
24 suffers from dyslexia.
25 The other bill that I told my students 71
1 we are discussing is House Bill 177, regarding PA
2 Core Standards. Like most of my students, most
3 teachers’ opinions waver regarding the PA Core and
4 the related Common Core Standards. It is not the
5 lightning rod that it is for the general public and
6 for some legislators.
7 You might ask: How can that be? I say
8 that, frankly, because, when given the time to be
9 creative and cutting-edge, teachers have met the
10 demands of the PA Core before anyone ever named it
11 such. In my own classroom, I have developed a mock
12 trial, written and performed my own plays, created
13 a Shark Tank game show, created our own board
14 games, began the National History Day competition
15 at our school, and this March we plan on writing a
16 bill for the general assembly to consider.
17 At Good Hope Middle School where I
18 teach, my colleagues have had students build
19 robots, experiment on pre-packaged foods, used
20 mathematical equations to analyze the shadows of
21 buildings and the speeds of passing traffic,
22 created artwork for their own t-shirts and then
23 printed them, worked a kiln and made some pretty
24 incredible monster vases, created their own award-
25 winning pieces of fiction and non-fiction, created 72
1 applications for their devices, constructed
2 incredible cutting boards for Christmas gifts -
3 which I wanted one, by the way -- and enjoyed the
4 curiosity behind learning. That’s what good
5 teaching is all about.
6 Today, unfortunately, some teachers are
7 so frustrated that they’re leaving the profession
8 because of the added rules, regulations, and lack
9 of time to do that kind of creative work. We can
10 say the same of some administrators as well. The
11 stresses on our profession are mounting, so are
12 they for the students, and we need your help.
13 Removing Keystone Exams as a graduation
14 requirement is one step we can make to improve the
15 ever-important role of educating our youth.
16 In summary, when you, as lawmakers,
17 give teachers the time to do great things, they
18 will do just that. We’ve seen it across our state,
19 and it’s happening right now, as we sit here today.
20 However, the standards and expectations have been
21 changed so many times in the last few years that we
22 have to be continually retrained in them. Coupled
23 with the additional requirements, such as the new
24 Student Learning Objectives and the Danielson Model
25 of Teacher Evaluation, it often feels like 73
1 educational guidelines are akin to building the
2 plane while it’s in mid-flight.
3 My fear is an education system that is
4 filled with droning instead of determination, one
5 that is filled with students and teachers who
6 operate in fear instead of best practices. Your
7 staff probably doesn’t operate best in fear.
8 Students and teachers don’t either.
9 I also fear that we are changing
10 education to be more about what we can
11 statistically measure rather than building
12 fundamental skills in students such as
13 collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking,
14 skills that will be vital to their future and to
15 ours.
16 I implore you to empower Pennsylvania’s
17 teachers. If you want better educational results,
18 there really is no other way. I cannot remember
19 much about that graduation project I referenced,
20 but I can tell you about the teachers who changed
21 my life with full conversations and lessons that
22 made me the concerned citizen speaking in front of
23 you today.
24 I speak for all teachers across the
25 commonwealth when I say we just want to continue to 74
1 empower the students for Pennsylvania’s posterity.
2 Thank you for the opportunity to
3 present comments on House Bill 168 and 177.
4 Jerry and I will now be glad to take
5 any of your questions at this time.
6 Thank you.
7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: For
8 committee members, we are at time for the next
9 panel to testify. I’m going to ask you to please
10 keep your questions short and ask you to please
11 answer as short as possible.
12 The chairman has really a question, I
13 guess, is we’ve talked about remediation in this
14 state for a long time. We’ve talked about at the
15 college level, what they need to do. The question
16 I have for both of you or one of you, whichever
17 wants to answer, or both, is it seems to me that by
18 the time we’re getting to middle school and to the
19 high school level, some of these students have
20 fallen behind, and that maybe that’s why we need to
21 do remediation.
22 Are we doing -- parents, teachers,
23 whoever -- doing our job at the lower level, K
24 through fifth grade, K through third grade,
25 whatever it may be, to make sure these students are 75
1 ready to move on to middle school? So, I’d
2 appreciate a comment from you on that.
3 MR. OLEKSIAK: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
4 Remediation is taking place and part of
5 the issue, I think, is -- you know, we’ve had some
6 comments from the committee earlier about the vast
7 difference between districts in Pennsylvania.
8 Right now, the resources aren’t adequate. They
9 just aren’t. The amount of resource that goes into
10 early childhood education just isn’t there. Those
11 are the things that make a difference and would
12 help in that remediation piece. We do remediation
13 every day in the classroom. There are formal kinds
14 of remedial classes. There are -- there’s
15 remediation that goes on constantly with our kids
16 in the classroom. It is something that we’re
17 concerned about, but it’s -- sometimes it amazes me
18 that some of our teachers in districts do the job
19 that they do, given the resources or lack of
20 resources that they have. That’s a short answer.
21 MR. MILLER: I can piggyback on that,
22 too, Mr. Chairman.
23 If we had the time to use to remediate
24 with students, we could use RTII, the response to
25 intervention and -- I forget what the acronym is. 76
1 We play a lot of alphabet soup games. But, yeah -
2 what is it, Jerry? RTI, yes.
3 But the problem is, the time frame in
4 the school day to do that. I would love to have
5 more time with students, and it seems like as the
6 years pass, the time that I have specifically with
7 students depreciates as the years continue.
8 So, I would say, at least the
9 Cumberland Valley School District, I would speak
10 that we are doing a pretty solid job of intervening
11 at the elementary level and the middle school
12 level. And it gets more difficult from there with
13 time.
14 Thank you.
15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
16 Representative Tobash.
17 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Just a quick
18 comment. Thank you very much.
19 And thank you for your testimony.
20 This is what I continue to hear from
21 educators, narrowing curriculum, steering students
22 away from important vocational education, really
23 important, I think, in the dynamic in Pennsylvania
24 right now, demoralizing for some students, really
25 devastating for a few, shrinks learning down and 77
1 expands and fills in that area with assessments.
2 So, it is problematic. So happy that we’re on the
3 same page, and, I guess, now we can start talking
4 about the pensions.
5 Thanks.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: That’s next
7 week, next hearing.
8 Representative Grove.
9 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Wow.
10 Thank you, gentlemen, for your
11 testimony.
12 Yeah. Jerry, in your testimony, you
13 know, you hit on the fact that, you know, trying to
14 maintain some consistency in education is
15 critical. And I cannot disagree with you more.
16 And I -- you know, my thought of review in House
17 Bill 177 isn’t to change the dynamics of the
18 system, create new academic standards, and going
19 through the entire process over again.
20 I do believe we need a cooling off
21 period, but I also believe in not allowing the
22 status quo to continue. And going in and seeing,
23 you know, if there’s issues, how do we correct
24 them, how do we move forward with it.
25 So, I don’t know if you have a 78
1 suggestion now or if we can continue that
2 conversation after the hearing, but how to ensure
3 that there is -- as far as the review part of the
4 legislation doesn’t involve a complete overhaul of
5 the system. And the gauge of that is how do we
6 ensure that Jake has the best tools and has
7 consistency to deliver academic quality in the best
8 way that he can.
9 MR. OLEKSIAK: I’d be happy, and we
10 certainly have the competent staff and our officers
11 would be happy to engage in that conversation.
12 I like the idea of the cooling off
13 period. I know — again, I’ve been a PSEA officer,
14 this is my eighth year now, but in the classroom,
15 it was, as Jake alluded, there was just one thing
16 after another, one idea after another, and then we
17 always dread it when our administrators -- who I
18 loved, by the way -- went to an in-service and
19 would come back, because there’d be another new
20 idea. And we didn’t have time to implement the two
21 or three previous ones, and now we are up on the
22 next one.
23 I think teachers are just very leery of
24 the constant scrutiny, the constant changes. And
25 we don’t -- as Jake said and I’ll say, we don’t -- 79
1 we expect to be evaluated. We understand
2 assessment. We want to be held accountable. We
3 don’t have any issues with that. The devil’s in
4 the details. It’s in the process that’s used.
5 It’s in the where -- how resources might be
6 diverted.
7 So, yes, we’d be happy to have a
8 conversation about how we can best implement the
9 standards that we have and what’s working and what
10 isn’t.
11 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Appreciate it.
12 And I want to clarify, I agree with
13 you, not disagree.
14 MR. OLEKSIAK: Thank you.
15 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Jake,
16 appreciate -- I’m here today because I liked my
17 social studies teacher. They did a great job.
18 MR. MILLER: I imagine many of you
19 are.
20 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Yeah. So, I
21 applaud you, and, hopefully, we’ll see some
22 Cumberland Valley students rise to the esteemed
23 elected whatever capacity.
24 MR. MILLER: There will be forty-four
25 of them competing in National History Day at 80
1 Messiah College this year. So, if you want to stop
2 by, they have some really awesome projects. Not on
3 pension, though.
4 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: That’s great.
5 MR. MILLER: That’s probably for a
6 different hearing; right?
7 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: You know, your
8 testimony, you know, as far as academic standards,
9 they don’t really rise -- and I understand you’re
10 in social studies, and it seems a lot of the ire
11 revolves around on the math side.
12 Have you talked to your colleagues
13 within the math department? How are they
14 communicating with parents and moving forward on
15 the changes, to try to suppress the ire with
16 parents, moving forward?
17 MR. MILLER: I would probably say,
18 before they speak, first they have to figure out
19 how they stop spinning. So, once, I think, that we
20 have figured out what the core is going to do, and,
21 like Jerry said, given the time the cool that we
22 can dig into the dish, most of them are pretty
23 successful.
24 There have been many meetings about the
25 core, and as I’m sure many of you in this room who 81
1 have students in high school or elementary or
2 middle school, math is probably the biggest concern
3 for most of you, because, for some students, if
4 they don’t get math, they could shut down right
5 away. So, we need to ensure that those students
6 aren’t engaging in such a response.
7 But we have had many meetings with the
8 community and encouraged students to use homework
9 after-school programs to work with teachers. And
10 there’s always a math teacher, at least at our
11 school, that is designated to help students with
12 math questions. And before I got into social
13 studies, I first taught math. So, I’m always not
14 afraid to take off that hat and put on the other
15 one and help some of those students as well,
16 because, you know, we are all together in for the
17 same reason: You guys on your end, teachers on our
18 end, parents from home, to help raise these
19 students to the highest level possible.
20 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Thank you.
21 And when the department went through
22 their eligible content, was that a helpful process
23 from your professional opinion?
24 MR. MILLER: Are you talking about the
25 eligible content related to the standards? 82
1 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Yeah.
2 MR. MILLER: From a social studies
3 perspective, very helpful, because, you know, when
4 the state legislature first rolled out standards
5 the first time, in 1999, the most difficult part to
6 read through was the social studies, because -- I
7 still remember getting my packet when I was in
8 college, and they printed it off, it was just like
9 thirty-five pages of standards. And I’m looking
10 through then, and I’m like, How am I going to teach
11 all these in one year?
12 It’s been nice to have it winnowed down
13 so that we can focus on some major and also
14 concrete things that we could see, like
15 collaboration is actually in the social studies
16 standards, as is -- well, we’ll base ours on the
17 English and reading. So, I’m fine with that. I
18 think that, as social studies teachers, I should be
19 a reading teacher as well.
20 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Thank you.
21 MR. MILLER: You’re welcome.
22 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
23 Representative Longietti.
24 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: Thank you,
25 Mr. Chairman. 83
1 Thank you, gentlemen, for all of your
2 time and effort, both in the classroom and outside
3 of the classroom.
4 Just one -- really, just want to focus
5 in on one question. The gist of your testimony
6 that I take away is that your beef is not so much
7 with the standards but it is with Keystone Exams as
8 a graduation requirement. We did hear from the
9 state board, who gave us the history of how we got
10 to where we got, and, you know, statistics on they
11 say one in three -- at one time, one in three high
12 school students enrolled in community college or
13 state system university needed remediation in
14 English or math.
15 What -- you know, from your
16 perspective, what is needed so that we get away
17 from that problem? That problem when kids graduate
18 from high school, that they need to be remediated
19 at college or, as the military says, they're not
20 ready to pass the military entrance exam, what's
21 lacking? Is it -- I heard a little bit from the
22 state board. They said, anecdotally, that
23 superintendents, when the kids aren't proficient,
24 are saying that the instruction delivery isn't
25 aligned to the standards and there needs to be 84
1 professional development and -- for the classroom
2 teacher. What do you see as the need?
3 MR. OLEKSIAK: I’ll address that
4 first.
5 I think, first, we need to take a step
6 back and understand that Pennsylvania’s public
7 schools are among the best in the country overall.
8 When you look at the NAEP scores, the National
9 Assessment of Educational Progress, we’re in the
10 top five in fourth and eighth grade reading and
11 math -- in most of those categories, except one
12 we’re seventh, we’re in the top ten.
13 So, our NAEP scores, which is probably
14 the most impartial and best designed test of how
15 schools are doing, we do a great job. Our PSSA
16 scores have been improved every year from 2002 to
17 2011. We’re starting to see some decline in the
18 past few years, and I think it’s because of -- and
19 this answers part of your question -- it’s
20 resources and time and focus. If we had what we
21 needed when we needed it, I think some of that
22 remediation would be addressed.
23 But I think we need to be careful in
24 painting with a broad brush that all the schools
25 are struggling. Most of our schools, the great 85
1 majority of our schools and our students and our
2 educators do a great job.
3 There are areas of need. And we know
4 what they are, and we don’t need test scores to
5 tell you. Any good researcher will tell you, they
6 need one number, one number to tell you what
7 school -- how the test scores in a district will
8 be. And that’s the zip code. And the zip code
9 will tell you all the socioeconomic information
10 that you need about income, about poverty levels,
11 about educational levels of the parents, employment
12 levels, all of that. All of that enters into it.
13 So, I think my -- I kind of look at it
14 from the other side. Despite some of the obstacles
15 that our schools are facing, they are doing an
16 amazing job. And if you were to look at those kids
17 who do need the remediation, I think you could do
18 the research and find out that it’s no secret why
19 they need to kind of help. And if we had those
20 resources where we needed them and when we needed
21 them in the schools, I think some of that would be
22 addressed.
23 MR. MILLER: And if I could piggyback
24 for a second, too. This is just my own personal
25 opinion, not my school district’s, not Jerry’s, not 86
1 PSEA. But if colleges are seeing a lower standard
2 student than they want, or businesses are seeing
3 the same, or if the military is seeing the same as
4 that, I would love to be able to, as a teacher, to
5 have a committee with different stakeholders to
6 say, okay, what do we do well, and where are you
7 seeing deficiencies? Is it the reading and
8 writing? Then maybe we need to have more reading
9 and writing instruction in our schools.
10 You know, can the average high school
11 student write a resume? Yes. But is it
12 technically instructed in your regular ed
13 classroom? No. And that’s something that you
14 would find on a core standard.
15 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: Thank you
16 very much.
17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
18 Representative Rapp.
19 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you,
20 Chairman Saylor.
21 Gentlemen, I just wanted to say that I
22 found your testimony very refreshing and very
23 honest. And you can mark this down, Representative
24 Rapp, very good, PSEA.
25 MR. OLEKSIAK: We’ll let our friends 87
1 across the street know.
2 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Truly, I am very
3 concerned. I agree with you. With every new
4 administration, you know, I’ve, myself, gone
5 through school, I have children, I have
6 grandchildren. Every time there’s a new
7 administration in Washington or in Harrisburg,
8 there’s a new initiative, and -- instead of
9 children needing that consistency.
10 And I also agree with you about the
11 remediation. I had a meeting with other area
12 legislators with our I-6 directors just a very
13 short while ago. One of their concerns was the
14 costs of this remedial. And students, they’re very
15 concerned.
16 As a matter of fact, where I live, we
17 have a higher ed council, because we do not have a
18 community college, but they are in place of a
19 community college. One thing that they are seeing,
20 and these are students with IEPs, remember, where
21 decisions are supposed to be made at the local
22 level. And they are seeing, our high ed council,
23 because they do GED for students who have dropped
24 out, they are seeing our students in special
25 education dropping out because they cannot do the 88
1 math. They don’t believe that they can pass these
2 Keystones. The school districts are not telling
3 them that they can graduate through their IEP or
4 through a project. And so our higher education or
5 high ed council is seeing an increase in the number
6 of special education students dropping out and
7 willing, motivated enough to take -- to study for a
8 GED, when they’re supposed to have all the supports
9 they need in special education.
10 I believe that when PDE testified -
11 or, I’m sorry, the State board, that, really, they
12 alluded to that the department gives all these
13 resources to local districts and -- for
14 remediation, and you’re saying that there’s a huge
15 cost. That’s what is my — what I found in
16 discussing with our directors at I-6.
17 Just curious, you’re saying that your
18 school district would be having to hire two more
19 teachers. Are those teachers to do instruction, or
20 is your particular school district just using the
21 computer system for students who are already
22 struggling? Not all students are going to learn
23 from something online or sitting in front of a
24 computer without an instructor.
25 MR. MILLER: Representative Rapp, thank 89
1 you for the question.
2 Yes, the design is for those two new
3 teachers solely to be for face-to-face remediation
4 instruction.
5 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you.
6 Because I see that as a real failure, when school
7 districts have that belief, and for whatever
8 reason, if there's a lack of resources, that you
9 can actually remediate a student by just placing
10 them in front of a computer. I don't think that
11 works.
12 So, I truly do appreciate your -- the
13 honesty in your testimony, and I wholeheartedly
14 agree. I've been very concerned about this
15 increasing the drop-out rate. And thank you for
16 being here.
17 MR. MILLER: Thank you.
18 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
19 Representative Hill.
20 REPRESENTATIVE HILL: Gentlemen, thank
21 you for being here today and providing this
22 testimony.
23 Much of what you've said today in
24 testimony I've heard as a school board director and
25 from really wonderful teachers who have been in the 90
1 district for a long time say the same thing. And
2 I -- let me find what Mr. Miller said, you know,
3 basically we have less time to teach. We teach
4 less content today than we taught two years ago,
5 five years ago, ten years ago.
6 So, I’m hoping that you can help me and
7 also help the members of this committee
8 understand. Obviously, you have been teaching
9 curriculum and content since you began to teach.
10 What is it about this current scenario with the
11 Keystone Exams that has caused the decline in the
12 quantity of content that we teach? Is it the
13 number of testing windows that the school has to
14 disrupt the schedule for? Is it that the
15 curriculum has changed, and we are -- we’ve added
16 new content? What exactly is causing us to not
17 teach as much content today as we did previously?
18 MR. MILLER: I would say, at our school
19 district, first, we had to realize which Keystone
20 would be enacted when and then make sure that our
21 curriculum was aligned, so that all the standards
22 were measured appropriately by that grade level.
23 Each curriculum has since redistributed when it’s
24 taught -- or what is taught when. So, you know, in
25 social studies, for example, we have been 91
1 realigning when we are teaching government and
2 civics, because that’s currently the social studies
3 Keystone that will be rolled out in a time to be
4 determined.
5 But for science, that’s seemed to have
6 been the most problematic, actually, for us at
7 Cumberland Valley. Our middle school sciences used
8 to all be exploratory in each different realm, and
9 now they’re being -- two of them are going to be
10 put towards biology, and then ninth grade is
11 biology. So, we’re teaching a lot more biology,
12 probably at the expense of other science
13 curriculum.
14 And as you see, if you look back at my
15 testimony, two of our most popular courses, anatomy
16 and physiology and biochemistry, which are huge
17 components of anybody who wants to enter the health
18 care industry, and, you know, students should want
19 to enter the health care industry. That is a
20 vastly growing field. They — these classes are
21 being currently discussed about being cut because
22 that would be at the expense of biology. They
23 would have to move the teachers towards biology, to
24 make sure that all the students pass the bio
25 Keystone. 92
1 If they don’t, then they just become a
2 group that is continually together and may
3 perpetually not pass that exam. And we’re at a
4 pretty decent school district. Jerry alluded to
5 the zip code saying a lot about your school. I
6 don’t teach in a zip code where a lot more students
7 struggle, but we still do see students struggle in
8 a massive scale. And I fear those groups of
9 students continually being together until they just
10 say, I’ve had enough, and dropping out.
11 MR. OLEKSIAK: If I could add, just
12 very quickly, we could literally bring a parade of
13 teachers in here who were teaching Shakespeare and
14 are now teaching remedial classes, who were
15 teaching, you know, advanced calculus that are now
16 teaching remedial classes, who were teaching social
17 studies in the middle school, but because it’s not
18 tested, they have been shifted to remedial classes.
19 So, that’s where that — that comes in as well.
20 And it’s frustrating not just for the
21 administrators and the students, as you mentioned,
22 but those teachers are frustrated, too, because, in
23 reality, that’s not what they signed up for.
24 REPRESENTATIVE HILL: Thank you very
25 much. 93
1 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
2 Representative Truitt.
3 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
4 Mr. Chairman.
5 Thank you, gentlemen, for your
6 testimony.
7 I’m going to try to keep this short. I
8 just want to point out, Mr. Miller, you touched on
9 something interesting there about the definition of
10 what is success in education. I think what you
11 defined as success in education, you guys mentioned
12 the NAEP scores, and what the business community
13 may define as success is a little different. And
14 that’s something that might need to be reconciled
15 before we can get answers from some of the things
16 that we discuss on this committee.
17 But I just wanted to repeat the
18 question that I gave to the last group and ask you,
19 and I see in hints in your testimony, where you
20 think the problem lies that causes a large
21 percentage of students not to pass the test. Do
22 you think it’s because the tests are poorly aligned
23 with the curriculum, or the curriculum’s poorly
24 aligned with the test, or the tests are poorly
25 aligned with the skills that the students really 94
1 need in the real world, and you guys are teaching
2 them what they need to know, because when you say
3 you have to do test prep courses, that suggests
4 that there’s some kind of a misalignment in there.
5 What is your opinion on why so many students don’t
6 pass the test?
7 MR. OLEKSIAK: All of the above and
8 more. There are five hundred school districts in
9 the state and five hundred different stories that
10 you could get from those districts about the
11 reasons why.
12 Some of it is, I think, the time
13 that -- sometimes we have the cart before the
14 horse. We had the assessments before the
15 curriculum, and then assessments were going to
16 change, and then the curriculum had to change. And
17 then we had to -- you know, the professional
18 development time wasn’t there. So, there’s been —
19 and maybe that’s why that cooling-off period that
20 we talked about might be a good idea, to allow some
21 time to focus.
22 Part of it is resources, that we talked
23 about and the whole zip code idea. There are -
24 the resources aren’t equal. The kids aren’t all
25 the same. The infrastructure of the districts are 95
1 not all the same. All of those have a direct
2 impact when -- I mean, I remember -- I'll try
3 again. I want to keep it brief.
4 But we have school districts that when
5 parents go in to open house night, there's the
6 chamber orchestra of the high school playing as
7 they walk into the building. And we have other
8 districts that there -- rain coming through the
9 roof and no extracurriculars, and it's a struggle
10 to get parents out to home-and-school night.
11 So, when we have that kind of
12 disparity, it's very difficult to expect the same
13 kind of results everywhere you go. There's just —
14 it's that's just -- it's a -- it's not a sound byte
15 kind of answer or a response that we can give to
16 why these things are happening.
17 I think it's really something that we
18 need to look at in great depth and not just from an
19 educational point of view, but from a legislative
20 point of view, a community point of view, all of
21 that enters into it.
22 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
23 Mr. Chairman.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
25 Representative Gillen. 96
1 REPRESENTATIVE GILLEN: Thank you,
2 Mr. Chairman.
3 Very briefly, thank you for your
4 testimony, Jerry and Jake. It comports well with
5 what I’m hearing from administrators, from teachers
6 about -- I’m Act 48 certified. My master’s degree
7 is social studies education, but I’ve not had the
8 privilege -- there you go -- being in the classroom
9 full time, but I’ve done some guest teaching. And
10 just very a brief question. Little bit curiosity.
11 You had 12 percent that reported that
12 they favored the Keystone Exams. What did you
13 learn from them?
14 MR. MILLER: From the 12 percent who
15 favored the exams? These individuals thought that
16 the Keystone Exam raised -- heighten challenge for
17 the students and that it has redirected their
18 teaching back towards the standards. That’s just
19 for that 12 percent.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: I thank the
21 panel. And, Jake, you mentioned about the
22 military. We will probably be hearing, in the near
23 future, from some of our admirals and generals
24 before this committee have expressed an interest in
25 talking to the committee members about their 97
1 thoughts on the education system. So, it’s our
2 hope that we will hear from the military as well in
3 the future.
4 Thank you.
5 MR. OLEKSIAK: Excellent.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Thank you.
7 The next panel to testify today is
8 Pennsylvanians Restoring Education group. Ryan
9 Bannister, who’s the regional coordinator, who’s
10 the legislative liaison; Cheryl Boise, who’s the
11 coordinator and research consultant; and Anita
12 Hoge, if I’ve got that right, who’s the chair of
13 the policy and research for the organization.
14 Welcome. And you may start once you’re
15 seated and ready to go.
16 MR. BANNISTER: Thank you for having us
17 here and for having this public hearing, Chairman
18 Saylor, Chairman Roebuck. And also thank you for
19 inviting PRE to be a participant.
20 These bills and the related issues of
21 federal standardized testing, Common Core, and
22 student data privacy should continue to be
23 discussed publicly. And I hope this trend of
24 public discussion continues.
25 In late 2012, a group of parents, 98
1 businessmen, school board members, and researches
2 met in western Pennsylvania to form the grassroots
3 group Pennsylvanians Against Common Core, otherwise
4 known as PACC. The intent was to provide extensive
5 research and analysis of the standards,
6 assessments, and data collection associated with
7 the Common Core initiative, both within the
8 commonwealth and across the country.
9 Since the inception, PACC has grown to
10 also include teachers, early learning experts,
11 special ed advocates, testing experts, people from
12 STEM fields, individuals who have taught or are
13 teaching at the college level, and educational
14 researchers from all corners of the state. PACC
15 continues to network with other groups and
16 individuals within Pennsylvania and across the
17 nation who are focusing on educational issues and
18 policies.
19 Due to the volume of work, the
20 overwhelming public interest and support of the
21 cause of PACC, and the need for positive solutions
22 in education, Pennsylvanians Restoring Education
23 was created this past year, to focus more
24 extensively on research and educational policies,
25 along with developing effective solutions for the 99
1 benefit of our students and their education.
2 Last fall, our organization met several
3 times with Secretary Dumaresq and Governor Corbett,
4 along with several members of house and senate
5 education committee. We look forward to having
6 similar meetings with our new governor and ed
7 secretary, as well as maintaining a partnership
8 with the education committees.
9 We are willing to sit down with any
10 members of this committee and other groups in
11 attendance at this hearing, to create an open and
12 public discussion. We believe not in talking
13 points but in extensive research, analysis of
14 actual government, that’s both state and federal,
15 documents and contracts. We’ll be focusing on the
16 facets of these bills and sharing some additional
17 related information.
18 We feel it is key that the committee
19 has a better understanding of our contractual
20 obligations prior to making changes. And we will
21 be outlining our previous suggestions made to
22 Secretary Dumaresq and Department of Ed within the
23 context of these bills.
24 And before we go to my colleagues here,
25 Representative Grove made a statement in his 100
1 opening remarks that Pennsylvania has gotten away
2 from Common Core. We actually have further
3 entrenched ourselves in Common Core, and,
4 Representative Grove, I’ll offer you the invitation
5 if at any time you’d like to sit down, I’ll help
6 you kind of get up to speed on what we have on
7 that.
8 Thank you. And I’ll turn it over to
9 Cheryl Boise.
10 MS. BOISE: Good morning. Thank you
11 for this opportunity. This is not my first rodeo.
12 I have testified in the past before the House
13 Education Committee as a parent. And I’ve done
14 some work with the Senate Education Committee.
15 I’m a researcher. Let me give you my
16 background, and I’m going to try to do this in the
17 time we have. I worked for a decade in private
18 industry. I was in management for a corporation in
19 western Pennsylvania. I have a background — I
20 decided to switch gears, and I have a background in
21 pre-K education. I also was the director of an
22 education nonprofit, where we do research.
23 Unfortunately, a lot of people think
24 that we get all of our information from talk
25 radio. We don’t even go near talk radio. We are a 101
1 totally research base.
2 I want to show you something, and we’re
3 going to start out. I’m going to walk you through
4 these bills, because what we did was, we met with,
5 finally, after multiple tries, Governor Corbett and
6 Secretary Dumaresq. And I will tell you, I did
7 meet with Secretary Tomalis, and we really didn’t
8 get anywhere.
9 So, I’m going to tell you what we
10 talked about. What I’m going to tell you is, we
11 have to open a really public dialogue about what
12 we’re doing, because we’re failing to do that, and
13 what we keep doing is the same thing over and over
14 again and expecting different results. And we are
15 here to say -- we’re trying to come up with a time
16 where we can invite you all, House and Senate
17 together -- I understand it’s not unheard of that
18 you’re all in the same room to hear the same
19 information at the same time. So, I have it on
20 good authority that if we do this, you can all show
21 for a doughnut, a cup of coffee, and we can sit
22 there and explain all the things we have uncovered
23 through reading the documents.
24 This is not an emotional reaction.
25 This is reading the documents and the contractual 102
1 obligation the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has
2 gotten themselves into.
3 We look at things like this. This is
4 the testimony back in 1997, late -- and it went on
5 for a while, about the PSSA. And it’s funny, I
6 could change the dates and the names, and the
7 conversation’s exactly the same, verbatim.
8 You have a crack in your foundation,
9 folks -- it’s called the PSSA -- and you’re trying
10 to put a roof on a building with a cracked
11 foundation, and it’s not working. And we’ll
12 explain to you what we explained.
13 I took a panel of people with me who
14 consisted of -- and we went to meet with Governor
15 Corbett -- and we are going to reach out to our new
16 governor and our secretary of Ed, and we want to
17 get them settled into their jobs, and then we’re
18 going to talk to them and tell them the same thing
19 we explained to Governor Corbett and Secretary
20 Dumaresq. And I will explain as we go through the
21 bill.
22 The panel of people I put together that
23 came to us to have this conversation were people in
24 STEM, who taught things like doctors, they were
25 people that were in early learning, special 103
1 education, the business community. They were a
2 diverse group of people. And we sat there and
3 explained how this should be done. Because I know
4 that the Department of Ed has said they’ve asked
5 for public comment.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Cheryl, can
7 I just stop you there?
8 MS. BOISE: Sure.
9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Look, I
10 don’t need to hear what your history is. The
11 members of the committee -
12 MS. BOISE: All right. Then -
13 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Let me
14 finish.
15 MS. BOISE: Okay.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: We’re here
17 to find out fact, and the history doesn’t matter.
18 This committee, as I said earlier when we started,
19 we know the history, the testimony -
20 MS. BOISE: Well, you allowed -
21 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: What we need
22 to know -
23 MS. BOISE: Okay.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: -- is facts
25 today. We need to hear where it’s wrong, not the 104
1 history. The committee doesn't have time to go
2 through the history today. Most of the members on
3 this committee, other than myself, have been here.
4 We need to know the facts today. So, I'd ask you
5 please stick to the facts of where you see the
6 problems are in these things, not -
7 MS. BOISE: Okay.
8 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Not history
9 of -
10 MS. BOISE: Excuse me, Representative.
11 I don't want to be confrontational, because you are
12 a representative.
13 You allowed the PDE, who I've heard
14 them speak, repeat the same talking points that
15 I've heard nine hundred times.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Cheryl, they
17 gave a history. That's what they were here for, to
18 start the hearing.
19 MS. BOISE: All right. We're -
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: I'm going to
21 make it clear here, I'm the chairman of the
22 committee, and we will go through the procedures as
23 I have outlined.
24 MS. BOISE: Okay.
25 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: We had 105
1 talked to you before you came here today -
2 MS. BOISE: You never talked to me -
3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: The
4 committee talked to your organization about how it
5 was to be handled. And I’m going to make it clear,
6 you didn’t listen to what we instructed you when
7 you were asked how to present your testimony
8 today. You came unprepared, as I said. I’m going
9 to let you continue -
10 MS. BOISE: No, we didn’t -
11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Cheryl,
12 don’t interrupt me. I’m telling you now. You will
13 follow the rules of the chair. Okay?
14 Now, get onto the rest of the testimony
15 as I have instructed.
16 MS. BOISE: I’m sure our parents who
17 are watching this are glad to hear that.
18 We’re going to start with Seth Grove’s
19 bill, Representative Grove. I appreciate the
20 opportunity to discuss your bill. One of the
21 things we talked about is how to structure this
22 kind of committee. We are not opposed to having
23 expectations or objectives in the classroom.
24 What we would suggest for this
25 committee is this. First of all, there was 106
1 discussed about learning. There is a thing called
2 developmentally appropriate practices, based on the
3 cognitive development of early learning. We have a
4 problem with the standards based on early learning.
5 We would suggest to some groups, and we did make
6 suggestions to specific groups that have looked at
7 this, like the childhood alliance, and there are
8 members across the state who can look at this from
9 an early learning perspective.
10 We also wanted everyone to look at it
11 from the special ed perspective. You’ve heard
12 comments already from the teachers about the
13 special ed. There are people who have already
14 looked at the Pennsylvania standards and have
15 already said that they would come to you and
16 outline what they see in special ed.
17 We also feel that because of reading
18 being part of learning and kids having dyslexia,
19 that you need reading specialists to be part of
20 this committee to review the standards.
21 So, we need early learning specialists,
22 not bureaucrats from the Office of Early Childhood.
23 We need special ed. We need people with
24 backgrounds in reading. We need math and language
25 arts people, both in the elementary, middle school, 107
1 and secondary level.
2 And then we have a real problem with
3 the definition of college and workforce readiness.
4 Having worked in private industry, one of your
5 problems is there is no one set of standards that
6 can really give you what you want. So, what we
7 suggest is this. You can consistently call upon
8 the community college, and you consistently call
9 upon the state university system. Now, I am not
10 against those. I’ve taken classes at a community
11 college. I was educated at a state university.
12 But what I’m hearing, and I attended a
13 meeting with the intermediate unit in my local
14 area, and they were talking about how we’re going
15 to teach less levels of math. And I was sitting
16 between two folks who were STEM people who taught
17 college, and that made no sense. And we pursued it
18 a little bit more, and I said, What do you think
19 about the proposal to eliminate calculus as a high
20 school math sequence, and they couldn’t give us an
21 answer. They said they agreed with that, they were
22 for that. But when we asked, well, how does that
23 promote STEM, we didn’t get a solid answer.
24 So, what we would suggest to you, we
25 suggested to and we will say this to governor and 108
1 the new secretary of Ed, is that you bring in
2 people like someone from, say, Carnegie Mellon
3 University, in Pittsburgh, who is maybe involved
4 with computer science or engineering, where they
5 have very high expectations. You know, there’s a
6 thing in sales, you can always come down, but you
7 can never go up.
8 So, I think what we need is we need an
9 objective analysis from people in STEM, maybe the
10 pre-med people at the University of Pennsylvania,
11 maybe the engineering department at Penn State
12 University main campus, who has higher
13 requirements, start with them and bring them in to
14 have a topic of conversation. Just bringing in one
15 of everything is not going to get this to what you
16 want for this.
17 In addition, I’m very thrilled that you
18 have representatives in this audience today from
19 vo-tech, from vocational training. We need them on
20 this committee. They need to be there.
21 We don’t want School to Work. I
22 mentioned that Marc Tucker, he’s a School to Work.
23 That’s the German and Chinese model of education.
24 The Chinese just announced they want to do like we
25 used to do because they pigeonholed their kids and 109
1 created the class system, and yet there’s no upward
2 mobility. We don’t want that, but let’s face it,
3 folks, plumbers don’t get outsourced. And we do,
4 in Pennsylvania, a very poor job, a very poor job
5 of promoting vocational training, and they should
6 be part of this dialogue and discussion, and they
7 haven’t been. They haven’t been. And you need to
8 be -- and we outlined at length a PR program to
9 promote vocational training in Pennsylvania, which
10 we -- I called Massachusetts. They have a waiting
11 list.
12 What we do in Pennsylvania is this. We
13 say all our kids go to college and we don’t want to
14 spend the money -- I’ve heard school districts do
15 this -- because our kids go to college. So, we
16 don’t want that attitude, and we came up with a PR
17 program to promote vocational training. So, you
18 want the top in the discussion, the schools like
19 Carnegie Mellon, engineering department of Penn
20 State. And you want, in addition to that, you want
21 the vo-tech folks in here, too. So, you have a
22 diverse, which you did not have going into this
23 like what we’re talking about, a diverse discussion
24 about what we really mean by standards.
25 So, let me tell you this, too. There’s 110
1 new research out that when we had the Carnegie
2 Unit, that turned out not to be a bad idea.
3 There's new research that says that actually works.
4 When you were in college and you got your semester
5 outline of what you were supposed to take, it said
6 X amount of units. It was a pathway into knowing
7 what you should do. So, everybody consistently
8 knew, who was majoring in engineering at Penn
9 State, you knew exactly what you were supposed to
10 be doing.
11 We don't do that anymore. It's like
12 flying by the seat of your pants. So, we need to
13 be specific. And one of the conversations has to
14 be about Carnegie Units and reinstating them as one
15 of the vehicles by which we have an idea about -
16 or the kids have a pathway to know what's going
17 on.
18 So, these are our recommendations to
19 you. We're willing to work with you on that. And
20 we're willing to -- because, let's face it, we're
21 out in the real world. We're out working in
22 business. We're out there working with pre-K. And
23 I will tell you this working with pre-K, there is
24 no one answer, folks. They didn't get the memo
25 they're all supposed to march to the same drummer. 111
1 And they all need different things. And
2 bureaucratic answers sometimes do not give them the
3 things that they need.
4 So, I would strongly -- Representative
5 Grove, I’m happy to give you, just as I did
6 Secretary Dumaresq, the names of the groups that we
7 suggest that would give you great feedback with
8 these standards. So, I’d really appreciate — I
9 can give that to you today. I can give you some of
10 the articles they have written and some of the
11 names and some of the people you might want to
12 consider for this committee.
13 Now, as far as the Senate bill on the
14 testing, when we were meeting with the governor and
15 Secretary Dumaresq, one of the things we talked
16 about is, because we had a retired school
17 psychologist, and that was her job, to do testing.
18 We talked about testing. And she asked this -- the
19 Secretary Dumaresq and the governor: Do you know
20 the difference between a test and an assessment?
21 And they all looked at her like they didn’t know
22 what she was talking about. And she said -- and I
23 know her name is Dr. Cathy Fike. I’m using her
24 name on TV, but I’m sure she knows that — she will
25 come out here. She’s been out here and listened to 112
1 some of the hearings already. And what Dr. Fike
2 said is you have assessments, and assessments is a
3 judgment on the system. Testing is a tool by which
4 all of the stakeholders -- the students, the
5 family, and the teachers -- are provided a road map
6 as to what the child knows and doesn’t know. Your
7 problem is, folks, you have an assessment; you
8 don’t have a road map anymore.
9 And I gave you a couple documents
10 because I think it’s a good example of what’s
11 happening and something you need to talk about in
12 relationship to any kind of discussion about the
13 testing. The one I gave you was from the old
14 achievement test. It tells you a couple things.
15 This was given to the parents. It was similar
16 information that was given to the school.
17 Everybody was on the same page. It tells you
18 weaknesses and strengths. It tells you if the
19 child makes a year’s worth of progress, which, by
20 the way, we looked at the PVAAS data. And it’s
21 interesting. Kids, even at the advanced level on
22 the PSSA, when you looked at the data, did not
23 necessarily make a year’s worth of progress.
24 That’s a big flaw. That’s a major flaw.
25 So, we need to know if the children are 113
1 making a year’s worth of progress, because the
2 foundation is cracked. You’re trying to put the
3 Keystones on top of a cracked foundation. So, you
4 need to have, as I indicated to you, ones with all
5 the graphs and all the things, that was from the
6 old achievement test. And that’s what we need.
7 We need a road map. We need testing
8 that will provide the information, because here’s
9 what’s happening. The other thing I gave you is a
10 PA -- PSSA and a Keystone Exam form, where the
11 parents have to pay seventy-five dollars if they
12 want to know how their child did on those tests.
13 So, what you’re doing is, you’re shutting the
14 parents out of the process because you’re not
15 providing them with any kind of information.
16 Because we’re so worried about meeting the federal
17 regulation that we’re not doing anything to provide
18 information to the parents. The parents apparently
19 don’t count in this process, but the one form said
20 that you have to pay seventy-five dollars -- you
21 can read it on there -- you have to fill it out in
22 order to get the information. And then you’re only
23 get to get the answers.
24 The first person who submitted that,
25 the first person who submitted that was a 114
1 Pennsylvania certified teacher. She wanted to see
2 her child’s Keystone Exam in algebra I because she
3 wanted to know how to help him, because what
4 happened in the district was -- and I’m sure this
5 parent would be glad -- she’s unfortunately not
6 able to be here today -- happy to tell you this,
7 but what happened was, she went to the school and
8 wanted -- the child starts the school year out in
9 geometry, and then when they got the cut scores and
10 everything -- by the way, cut stores is like
11 grading on a curve -- and which is little
12 questionable, using cut scores. I’m a little
13 concerned about that. But the child was going to
14 be removed from geometry and put back in algebra I
15 in October. So, the mother wanted to see the
16 teacher, what the child did. She said she had to
17 fill out this form, pay seventy-five dollars, and
18 we’re only going to show you the answers.
19 If this is really about kids and
20 learning, we wouldn’t be doing this this way.
21 There would be a different kind of communication
22 between the home and the school that’s not
23 happening now.
24 And don’t assume that all parents don’t
25 care. Parents are a key part of the success of the 115
1 children. I’ve worked with enough little ones, you
2 can tell when that’s important. I’ve raised my own
3 children. Very critical. And you’re cutting the
4 parents out of the loop with this information.
5 So, what you have is nothing more than
6 an assessment judging the system as opposed to
7 actually having -- the wording on -- Representative
8 Tobash, I know you’re going to want to know about
9 the wording. I was a little confused about your
10 wording. Representative Saylor, you didn’t know
11 this, but at the same time one of our counties -
12 one of the county -- we have county coordinators -
13 sent me a letter that you sent it, and in that it
14 sounded like -- the wording was different than the
15 wording in -- and I’ll give you the letter so you
16 can see it. The wording made it sound like you
17 were going to get rid of this and put this in the
18 hands of school districts, but when I matched it
19 against the bill, it’s off. So, I’m a little
20 confused about the wording in the bill, to tell you
21 the truth, Representative Tobash.
22 I think we can -- we can help you with
23 wording, but in addition to that -- I guess the
24 question is, why are we really doing a graduation
25 testing, other than it’s a bureaucratic answer to 116
1 get some money. And it’s always an underfunded
2 mandate in the end. It always is.
3 I have a list somebody gave me,
4 gentleman made a presentation to the IUs, and it’s
5 a list of all the underfunded mandates. And if I
6 lifted it up here, it would hit the floor. And we
7 keep adding things to that. That’s really our
8 problem? The federal government says, Jump, and we
9 say, How high? For two dollars and fifty cents.
10 And then it costs us a million after we found it
11 out. So, that seems to be a problem.
12 But one of the things also in your
13 bill, you reference No Child Left Behind in this,
14 and you may know -- and I don’t know how much
15 you’re watching this, because one of the things
16 we’re worried about is do you know what’s in your
17 contracts, because we did request the contracts.
18 Not the Right to Know, we wanted to see what was in
19 the contracts so we clearly understood what we were
20 into. Because, you know, we can talk about this
21 all day, but we need to see the contracts.
22 So, we tried to get it through the
23 House, didn’t happen, got it through the Senate.
24 Right now, in Washington, No Child Left Behind is a
25 big deal. You’ve got to be watching what they’re 117
1 saying. I've looked at the synopsis of that bill.
2 We can talk about this all day. If you don't know
3 what's in the contracts and you don't know what
4 they're doing, then I'm not sure exactly what we
5 can do until we have a clear picture of where we
6 should proceed.
7 Now, I know we are going to deviate a
8 little bit, but we have to talk about the
9 agreements, and we have some questions and comments
10 about the agreements. We don't know what you
11 know. And we are concerned about these bills going
12 down this road because we don't know what you
13 know. We have read these things. It's not as it
14 seems.
15 So, Mrs. Hoge, who's spent decades
16 looking at contracts, wanted to ask you about these
17 contracts and find out if you knew about them, and
18 if you could please -- because this is very
19 complicated and there' so much of it, guys. We're
20 not trying to blindside you. We're trying to start
21 a conversation today that we want to continue to
22 have. And we are not doing this to be
23 confrontational. I apologize if you thought that,
24 Representative Saylor. That's not at all the
25 case. 118
1 I just wanted you to know that we’re a
2 little bit more than just a bunch of parents being
3 emotional. I just wanted you to understand that.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: And, Cheryl,
5 I understand that. But we have a conversation with
6 people, whoever, about how we wanted testimony
7 presented today.
8 MS. BOISE: Well, I apologize for that.
9 But let’s proceed in the dialogue, and we want to
10 have an open conversation. We don’t want to
11 blindside you.
12 This has taken us years. I have spent
13 six years reading contracts.
14 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: And I do
15 appreciate that. It’s not -- but, again, the
16 members of the committee are not here to answer
17 questions. If you want to have a discussion -
18 MS. BOISE: No, I want you to ask us.
19 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Okay. I
20 thought you were going to ask us questions.
21 MS. BOISE: No, no, no. I want you to
22 ask us questions, and I want to create a
23 conversation which I hope is started today.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: When you’re
25 done, we’ll open it up for questions for you. 119
1 MS. BOISE: Okay. Okay.
2 I’m going to let Mrs. Hoge go ahead,
3 because she’s the lady with all the contracts that
4 will make your eyes glaze over.
5 MS. HOGE: Thank you, Chairman Saylor
6 and the committee.
7 I wanted to just kind of relate that
8 when the state board talked about the quality goals
9 of education when they began, and they had an
10 assessment that they started in 1965. That was the
11 EQA. I was the parent that filed the federal
12 complaint against the Pennsylvania EQA.
13 Pennsylvania was forced to withdraw the
14 Pennsylvania EQA because they were testing
15 attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs. So, I’m
16 actually pretty much an expert at reading contracts
17 from Pennsylvania.
18 Also, with the resolution of that
19 complaint, Pennsylvania was forced to implement a
20 policy on the state level. It’s called Basic
21 Education Curricular 8-90, that stated that
22 Pennsylvania would never do that again. They would
23 never test attitudes again.
24 And I will have to say that we had
25 found, just recently, that the state board and the 120
1 Department of Ed is trying to implement that again,
2 and that’s for later on in the discussion.
3 When you were referring to your House
4 Resolution 338 when you began, and you stated that
5 you -- the House would want local control, they
6 didn’t want a model curriculum, they didn’t want a
7 national standardized test, they didn’t want it to
8 be burdensome, they wanted to protect the privacy
9 of children. I can tell you that the Pennsylvania
10 Department of Ed is violating every one of those
11 right now.
12 And I think it would be really
13 important to give an overview, just briefly, about
14 the Common Core, and it was stated that, you know,
15 it was -- actually a memorandum or a contract that
16 the state went into. It is — the contract was
17 accepted in forty-five different states.
18 The thing that most people do not
19 realize, that the Common Core was actually a power
20 shift away from local district, more towards the
21 state creating a graduation requirement, which, of
22 course, one would be the Keystone Exams. But, more
23 importantly, what that did was also standardize the
24 data elements also for computer retrieval. So, not
25 only were they stating that every child had to meet 121
1 specific outcomes, that’s a huge power shift, where
2 before it was the local district that was creating
3 the standard and the teacher in the classroom.
4 So, what you have is somewhat federal
5 encroachment by having standards that are coming
6 down upon the states. So, it’s basically a huge
7 power shift to the individual child. So, now we’re
8 saying, our children in Pennsylvania have to meet
9 individual standards that someone on the federal
10 level had created.
11 Now, the other thing that’s really
12 important about that is that it was a contract that
13 the state went into. They stated that you had to
14 use 85 percent of those standards. You only have
15 the availability to change 15 percent. That 15
16 percent is what has been going on for the last
17 several years, changing the standards or doing
18 whatever and improving them. We have 85 percent of
19 the national curriculum that we have accepted
20 because of the memorandum we did.
21 Now, the second thing that was really
22 important that was federal encroachment was the
23 change to the Family Education Rights and Privacy
24 Act, which is FERPA. I got very much more involved
25 in Pennsylvania education. I actually do more 122
1 national speaking than I do in the state, but that
2 has changed recently. The Family Education Rights
3 and Privacy Act was changed by an executive order
4 by the President. Unfortunately, what happened at
5 that time was that there were contracts now allowed
6 to be had between our state Departments of
7 Education with outside contractors.
8 Knowing that the regulation had
9 changed, I had a meeting, and Mr. Bannister was
10 present at the meeting, one was a representative,
11 Representative Lawrence, and one was Senator
12 Folmer. We requested these contracts that actually
13 allow these third-party contractors to have access
14 to personally identifiable information on our
15 children. Most people do not know that. It’s a
16 loop hole and a new FERPA regulation.
17 We requested those contracts from
18 Senator Folmer, and we do have them all. We do
19 have the Keystone contracts, and we have actually
20 read them all.
21 The second thing that it did with the
22 FERPA regulation was that in order to create these
23 individual standards, the federal government was
24 implementing a data system to monitor.
25 Pennsylvania Department of Ed has accepted over 123
1 twenty-four million dollars from the National
2 Center of Education Statistics to implement this
3 data system to collect information on individual
4 children. However, when we look closer at the
5 contract, it was actually a contract that was to be
6 implemented as a national ID for every child,
7 adult. Every adolescent, every teacher, every
8 principal, every superintendent has now a national
9 ID. The significance of this was that the data
10 system was to be implemented to create a womb-
11 to-workplace data system. This is a huge invasion
12 of privacy. The personal identifiable information,
13 the definition expands beyond reading and math. It
14 expands to voice prints, fingerprints, DNA strands,
15 et cetera, that can be accessed by these
16 third-party contractors without informed written
17 parental content.
18 Parents do not know about it.
19 Legislators don't know about it. These contracts
20 are extremely important because this is violating
21 the privacy of our children and our families. And,
22 of course, this is all on individual students.
23 Every student was given a unique
24 national ID, so in 2007 was the last where they had
25 implemented and added children who were being born 124
1 and all the way into retirement, they included the
2 information on wages from the Department of Labor.
3 So, this information is being transferred not only
4 within the Department of Education to third-party
5 contractors, but also to the Department of Labor
6 and -- et cetera.
7 So, the third aspect that I wanted to
8 talk about was Pennsylvania’s acceptance of the
9 ESEA flexibility waiver, which was No Child Left
10 Behind. And one thing that I do want to comment
11 on -- and I actually love the last part of your
12 bill, Senator Tobash -- I’m sorry, Representative
13 Tobash, saying that you want to get rid of these,
14 the Keystones. However, on sentence 17, 18, and
15 19, you state: As required by No Child Left
16 Behind -- with a statute -- or any successor
17 statute.
18 Which meant that you actually just put
19 federal statute into state law. And I would ask
20 that we remove that so that we are not beholding to
21 the federal government. I would ask that we only
22 say that we want to get rid of the Keystones. I
23 would be very happy about that.
24 So, talking about the waiver, and,
25 again, what Secretary Duncan had stated or had done 125
1 at the time waived federal law. So, you have No
2 Child Left Behind, which was a federal statute, and
3 he had presented waivers to every state.
4 The contracts that we have from
5 National -- I’m sorry, it wasn’t -- it’s Data
6 Recognition Corp, stated specifically that we do,
7 in fact, have a model curriculum, that we do our
8 testing Common Core outright. It says that’s what
9 we are doing. And the current contract that we
10 have is 2014. So, you may say that we may have
11 done away with Common Core, but the testing in the
12 contracts are moving forward with Common Core,
13 specifically.
14 The other things that happened, and it
15 was also the standards-aligned system, which is
16 copyrighted system of this model curriculum that
17 the teachers must teach to because they are being
18 evaluated on how well their children are testing.
19 What happened with the waiver is that, under Title
20 I, which was discussed this morning, poverty
21 guidelines were lowered. So, in the past, where
22 Title I children were usually -- or the poverty
23 children were usually -- you had to have 40 percent
24 of free and reduced lunch in order to have a
25 school-wide program, that meant that only certain 126
1 children would be -- you know, would have the free
2 breakfast and free lunch and have specific
3 instruction in reading. That has changed. The
4 definition changed to educationally deprived. Any
5 child who’s not meeting a Common Core standard is
6 now educationally deprived.
7 Therefore, once they lowered that
8 poverty guideline to zero, that was a blanket of
9 Title I on every school district. Every school
10 district would be mandated, through federal
11 mandates, to meet the standards that were being
12 implemented in your state, which would be Common
13 Core.
14 The waiver also expanded all of the
15 academic areas into what they considered
16 nonacademic social, emotional, and behavioral
17 standards. This is in the effective domain. This
18 directly is in violation of the Protection of Pupil
19 Rights Amendment, and Pennsylvania has tried to
20 implement these standards again. And in your
21 packet is a packet called Interpersonal skills
22 standards, which were put on the SAS portal,
23 stating that they were academic standards. They
24 are not. This is a consumer protection. Parents
25 have no idea what these are. But they are testing 127
1 attitudes, values, dispositions of children.
2 Now, how we moved forward with trying
3 to tell -
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Sorry. I
5 want you to wrap up, because we’re past the -
6 MS. HOGE: Yeah, I know.
7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: -- time that
8 we allotted in minutes for each member. We’re
9 behind schedule -
10 MS. HOGE: Well, we wanted -- all
11 right. When we had gotten the contract from
12 Senator Folmer’s office, and Andrew Paris was
13 there, from the governor’s office. The
14 interpersonal -- I had presented the Interpersonal
15 Skills. Two days after I presented them, the
16 governor had expunged the website portal of all the
17 effective domain, which meant that they knew that
18 they were violating federal law. So, basically,
19 what I am saying, that this federal encroachment,
20 which is forcing this on our state is most of our
21 problem. Most of our problem.
22 And the other part to the waiver was
23 that the remediation that was talked about this
24 morning, and I believe it was called the fidelity
25 of teachers. Okay? They talked -- I believe, 128
1 Ms. Perez talked about the fidelity of teachers.
2 The teachers are being trained specifically to
3 teach to these standards. The diagnostic tool is
4 just not academics. The diagnostic tool is
5 academic and behavior. So, when they talk about
6 response to intervention, when they talk about the
7 positive behavior intervention supports, we’re
8 talking about interventions in the area of
9 attitudes, values, opinions, beliefs, dispositions
10 of children that are in violation of federal law.
11 Thank you.
12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
13 Representative Tobash.
14 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you.
15 I just want to thank the panel for
16 their testimony. You brought it back here to just
17 briefly touch -
18 MS. BOISE: I’m sorry. Could you speak
19 up? I can’t hear you very well.
20 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you or
21 your testimony. I appreciate you’re bringing it
22 back just briefly to the bill. I’m happy to talk
23 about the wording in the bill that we have in front
24 of us today. You brought up some issues right here
25 that we’ve got to discuss in a different forum. 129
1 So, for brevity, I appreciate the fact
2 that you were here today, but we want to really
3 focus on the task at hand, and that’s two bills
4 that we’re considering at the hearing today. Thank
5 you.
6 MS. BOISE: Okay. I think we outlined
7 that. And we’re willing to work with you on that.
8 And we are willing to look at the wording again on
9 your bill and try to make it a little more -
10 because it was a little -- a lot of people looked
11 at it and were a little concerned about the wording
12 as far as actually getting rid of it as a
13 graduation requirement. It wasn’t quite clear.
14 I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at
15 the Senate bill. It was a little more specific.
16 So. Okay?
17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
18 Representative Rapp.
19 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you,
20 Mr. Chairman.
21 I just want to thank the panel for
22 being here. I know you’ve brought up a lot of
23 information that maybe sounds, you know, out of a
24 lot of our realm. But I do know that parents are
25 extremely concerned, you know, across the nation. 130
1 I’ve seen some folks -- Facebook postings of some,
2 you know, tests and -- on different subjects and
3 things that are being asked of our students.
4 Certainly, you have -- I am really not
5 aware, certainly, as much as you are. I’m
6 certainly willing to sit down and talk with you
7 further.
8 But I know that the content and parents’
9 rights are extremely important to parents across
10 the state. Whether it’s the right to privacy or
11 viewing tests or having access to textbooks,
12 curriculum or what children are being tested on.
13 So, I appreciate you bringing this information to
14 our attention.
15 Unfortunately, I don’t believe that we
16 have the time to really go into the depth that you
17 were prepared to do today. But, thank you for your
18 testimony.
19 MS. HOGE: I do want to state that we
20 are willing -- very willing to sit down and share
21 the information that we had found. My saying that
22 this is a unique national idea are not my words.
23 That it was a womb-to-workplace data system are not
24 my words. That we are violating privacy is
25 something that we can prove. 131
1 And we are very willing to sit down and
2 explain. If you want to have a legislative
3 breakfast, whatever it takes, because the children
4 are the most important part here.
5 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you.
6 MS. HOGE: And our families are the
7 most important part.
8 And I believe that if the parents
9 really understood this information that was flowing
10 to the federal government, I think you would
11 believe that all hell is going to break loose.
12 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: That may possibly
13 be. I have been reminded regarding Common Core. I
14 was around during outcome-based education. And to
15 me it's just a remake of outcome-based education.
16 I was on a panel back in my district, a strategic
17 plan. And it has reminded me of everything that
18 was proposed in outcome-based education.
19 So, thank you.
20 MS. BOISE: Representative Rapp, thank
21 you for this opportunity. I just -- because you're
22 special, I just want to say one other thing. I was
23 leading up to this, and I apologize, I didn't get
24 there fast enough.
25 We were part of the beta testing for 132
1 the website on the portal to get public input.
2 There are parents in our audience today that
3 participated in that. It was poorly worded for
4 public scrutiny. I went to Secretary Dumaresq with
5 the problems, suggested we would help them put
6 together a consumer-based website so the public
7 could give input. Unfortunately, that never
8 happened.
9 So, I wanted you to know the level
10 we’re willing to cooperate. We were willing to
11 help with that website, even with the beta
12 testing. Unfortunately, it was not structured
13 correctly.
14 So, thank you.
15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Again, thank
16 you to the panel for testifying today. I know that
17 you have a lot of issues. Some of those are
18 federal issues and stuff. And that’s just not the
19 jurisdiction that the hearing today is on.
20 Believe me, I’m sure many members of
21 this committee would be glad to sit down and talk
22 to you about some of the issues brought up today
23 and look forward to working with your organization
24 as we move forward.
25 But, again, I think we share some of 133
1 the frustrations you have with some of the federal
2 mandates that we face, No Child Left Behind and
3 others, that schools and parents are faced with
4 today.
5 So, Mr. Bannister.
6 MR. BANNISTER: Real quick, I just
7 wanted to address Representative Tobash.
8 Thank you so much for putting this bill
9 together. It show you have an intent and a desire
10 to actually improve things. And Representative
11 Grove also as well.
12 Nobody is questioning that the schools’
13 standards, curriculum, tests can be improved. We
14 should always hold children to a higher standard,
15 hold ourselves as parents, as elected officials, as
16 school representatives, everybody should always
17 strive for a higher standard.
18 I think with what Mrs. Hoge was
19 discussing about the contracts is -- I just think
20 we need a better understanding of what we’re
21 getting ourselves into when we commit ourselves to
22 federal statutes and things like that. Getting rid
23 of the Keystone Exams, getting rid of the
24 graduation requirement, absolutely the right path.
25 I just think we have to have a better idea of which 134
1 road we are going to take and where exactly it’s
2 going to lead us when we do that. Are we going to
3 end up, you know, making education basically a ward
4 of the federal government, or we going to return it
5 to local control, as has been discussed here
6 today?
7 I obviously am a proponent of local
8 control. And I really hope that through the
9 continued public discussion, that we can eventually
10 get to that level. And, again, as everybody
11 here -- my colleagues have stated, we invite all of
12 you to contact us, reach out to us. We will hold
13 any event, breakfast, whatever, to go into more
14 details what exactly what we’re entangled with
15 and -
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Appreciate
17 that. We need to really wrap it up and move on
18 testimony-wise.
19 We -- I think members will take
20 advantage of the opportunity to meet with you and
21 discuss that. But like I said, we’re still
22 discussing two bills today.
23 So, I thank you for your testimony.
24 And we need to move on to the next panel at this
25 time. 135
1 Thank you very much.
2 MS. HOGE: I’d like to just make one
3 comment before I leave.
4 With the information that we have to
5 share with you, I really believe we need an
6 injunction on the data system until investigation.
7 And I would ask that we sit down and talk about
8 that, because the Pennsylvania information
9 management system -
10 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: And
11 I appreciate your comment, but, really, that is not
12 the jurisdiction of the hearing today. There may
13 be another hearing in the future to discuss —
14 MS. HOGE: I’m just asking -
15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: And I
16 understand that. But that’s not -- other members
17 are waiting to testify, and we’re sticking to the
18 two bills we have today.
19 That is a discussion that we may need
20 to have in the future, and I appreciate that.
21 I -
22 MR. BANNISTER: This all ties together.
23 MS. BOISE: And this -
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: I’m not
25 discounting anything you said today. I’m just 136
1 saying that we need to move on to the next panel
2 because the discussion today was on the two house
3 bills that Representative Tobash and
4 Representative -
5 MS. BOISE: And we did talk about
6 them.
7 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: And
8 appreciate that.
9 MR. BANNISTER: Those bills are
10 affected by all of that.
11 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: And I
12 understand that, but we are specifically on those
13 two bills today. And we will continue those
14 discussions, but not today. We are beyond the
15 testimony time that was allotted for your group.
16 MS. HOGE: Thank you so much.
17 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Thank you.
18 The next panel to testify today is the
19 Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators.
20 We have Dr. Eric Eshbach, who is the superintendent
21 of Northern York County School District. We have
22 Miss Lee Ann Wentzel, who is the superintendent of
23 the Ridley School District. We have Dr. Scott
24 Deisley, from the Red Lion Area School District,
25 who is superintendent there. And Dr. Michael 137
1 Snell, who is the superintendent of the Central
2 York School District.
3 And you may start whenever you're
4 ready.
5 DR. ESHBACH: Good morning,
6 Representative Saylor. We thank you for the
7 opportunity to speak on behalf of the Pennsylvania
8 Association of School Administrators on both House
9 Bill 168 and 177.
10 My name is Eric Eshbach. I serve as
11 the chair of the PASA legislative committee, and
12 I'm also superintendent of Northern York County
13 School District. Joining me today to address House
14 Bill 168 is a fellow superintendent from York
15 County, Michael Snell, who's superintendent of the
16 Central York School District.
17 Our colleagues, Lee Ann Wentzel and
18 Scott Deisley, will address House Bill 177
19 immediately following our testimony.
20 We've provided written testimony, and
21 we're not going to read that. We know you all
22 scored proficient when you were in school, so we're
23 just going to highlight a few things.
24 Specifically, Michael and I want to
25 talk about York County and what we have been 138
1 doing. You’ve heard the testimony on the Keystone
2 assessments. You need to know that staff from the
3 sixteen high schools in York County have been
4 reviewing the best way to offer the courses to the
5 Keystone Exams, proper course sequence, the
6 curriculum and textbooks necessary to ensure
7 success and the instructional practices that will
8 best enable our students to be prepared for the
9 tests.
10 In reality, however, with a significant
11 number of students who have not achieved
12 proficiency on the exam, we’re spending more time
13 trying to figure out how we will remediate the
14 students prior to the next administration of the
15 exam and how we can fit these remediation classes
16 into a student’s already packed schedule.
17 We’re spending time preparing for how
18 we will handle students who can’t pass the exam
19 after the second administration and will need to
20 enter into the project-based assessment, yet we
21 have been given no guidance or parameters as to
22 what those projects will look like, how long they
23 will take, and the staff necessary to ensure
24 completion of the projects.
25 As superintendents, we’ve been 139
1 struggling with the procedures and the criterias we
2 will use in issuing an exemption for students who
3 have not been able to demonstrate proficiency. It
4 sounds simple to say "extenuating circumstances” or
5 whatever terminology is out there. The fact of the
6 matter is, we have to -- we’re dealing with
7 individual students and individual lives. And we
8 have to make those determinations on a daily
9 basis.
10 We’ve been spending valuable time
11 working to prepare students for a test instead of
12 showing them how the standards and core content
13 associated with these courses will apply to our
14 lives after graduation.
15 I’d like to have Michael talk to you a
16 little bit about what’s going on in Central York.
17 DR. SNELL: In time of great change
18 brought on by technology and access to information,
19 we believe it is wrong to mandate a test based on
20 knowledge of algebra I, biology, and literature.
21 The feedback we hear are our graduates
22 need to know how to think for themselves,
23 communicate and collaborate across oceans and
24 continents, and learn to be creative and critical
25 thinkers. The Keystone Exams does not provide any 140
1 feedback or guidance in these critical 21st century
2 skills.
3 Central York is focusing on providing
4 real-world work for real-world audiences that have
5 little in common with the standardized test. For
6 example, Central just opened the Panther Perk. In
7 conjunction with a local business operator, K and K
8 Coffee, our learners have the responsibility to
9 determine if this venture was legal on a number of
10 fronts, find start-up capital, create and build a
11 space, work with our food service director, our
12 business manager, and others to bring this vision
13 of a student-run business to fruition. Nowhere are
14 the skills, motivation, entrepreneurship, drive,
15 and determination measured on a standardized test.
16 As a matter of fact, there is nothing standardized
17 about Central’s Panther Perk or our student-run
18 catering or public relation businesses at Central.
19 The time to administer and account for
20 standardized tests all takes away from what I
21 believe you, our parents, and the community want
22 for our graduates. The anxiety of our learners to
23 endure for the sake of a quick assessment, one in
24 which their graduation depends, is terribly
25 disconnected from what I believe we really want our 141
1 graduates to know and be able to do when we present
2 them with their diploma.
3 DR. ESHBACH: One group of students for
4 whom I have particular concern is -- was brought up
5 earlier, and that’s our career technical center
6 students. Northern’s students attend Cumberland
7 Perry Vocational Technical School, while the other
8 York County schools -- high schools send their
9 students to the York County School of Technology.
10 I’m going to speak about Cumberland
11 Perry. It’s an outstanding school that offers a
12 partial day program in twenty-two career areas.
13 Those students are — are assessed using the
14 National Occupational Competency Testing Institute,
15 or NOCTI, which are true measures of how a CTC
16 student will perform in his or her chosen career
17 field. It is, for lack of a better term, an
18 authentic measure, of the knowledge a student has
19 gained. And at Cumberland Perry, we have nearly 93
20 percent of our students have shown proficiency in
21 the twenty-two NOCTI exams that were given last
22 year. Ninety-three percent, that’s pretty
23 impressive.
24 Yet, we have significant concerns that
25 the majority of those students have not shown 142
1 proficiency on the Keystone Exams. Now, one might
2 argue, and they have, that when proficiency on the
3 Keystone Exam is required for a student to graduate
4 in the class 2017, that those students will then
5 take the Keystones more seriously, show more
6 concern, and subsequently score higher. Perhaps
7 that would occur, but at what cost?
8 In order to ensure these students are
9 proficient in algebra, biology, and English lit,
10 we’ll have to offer additional courses to remediate
11 the students at the expense of courses at the
12 vo-tech.
13 Questions have started to circulate as
14 to whether a student who cannot pass the Keystones
15 would have to stay back at our high school and not
16 be permitted to attend the vo-tech until
17 proficiency is attained. Others suggest that
18 additional Keystone prep or remediation courses be
19 offered at the vo-tech at the expense of their
20 practical training in the shop environment.
21 I will fight long and hard against
22 either of those occurring. The community I serve
23 has a long storied history of business and industry
24 that relies heavily on career and technical
25 trades. I will not the ability of a 143
1 student to learn a highly skilled trade simply so
2 he can pass the Keystone Exam.
3 I’m confident that my health and well
4 being, as well as yours, depends heavily on
5 carpenters, welders, electricians, and mechanics.
6 To rob these student from their desired careers and
7 overlook their talents would be detrimental to our
8 community, our commonwealth, and our nation. We
9 need to stop standardizing learning and assessment
10 for our students and begin customizing it to the
11 talents, needs, and abilities.
12 Keystone Exams used as a graduation
13 requirement ensures standardization and denies the
14 student the right to choose his or her path in
15 life. Passing House Bill 168 will be a bold
16 statement to our students that every one of them
17 matters.
18 At this point in time, I’m going to
19 turn it over to Mrs. Wentzel and Dr. Deisley to
20 talk about 177.
21 MS. WENTZEL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman,
22 committee members, for giving PASA the opportunity
23 today to speak on or give you our thoughts on House
24 Bill 177.
25 I am Lee Ann Wentzel. I serve on the 144
1 legislative committee for PASA as well as the
2 superintendent for Ridley School District, which is
3 in Delaware County.
4 Joining me today, Dr. Scott Deisley,
5 will be speaking on behalf of -- as superintendent
6 of Red Lion Area School District, which is located
7 in York County.
8 PASA supports clear and rigorously,
9 developmentally appropriate state academic
10 standards, together with an aligned system of
11 assessments and accountability that uses multiple
12 measures of student achievement to fairly and
13 appropriately inform students, parents, teachers,
14 administrators, school boards, state policy makers,
15 and taxpayers as to the academic achievement of our
16 public schools.
17 However, as we support House Bill 177
18 in the establishment of a commission to review the
19 PA Core Standards, we urge strong caution that
20 students, parents, teachers, and schools are
21 suffering from a bad case of state policy whiplash,
22 resulting from what now becomes a regular practice
23 of frequently changing state standards, what
24 happens when that occurs.
25 Students who were enrolled in first 145
1 grade in the year 2005 are currently our eleventh
2 graders. They have now been taught and held
3 accountable under the third set of state
4 standards. This becomes very difficult and
5 challenging within a school district to make
6 decisions about how to align your curriculum to the
7 expected outcomes.
8 In Ridley School District, we
9 thoughtfully engaged in adjusting the local
10 curriculum to align to the state standards. Like
11 many districts, we prefer a regular curriculum
12 cycle in which to be thoroughly efficient and
13 fiscally responsible in making those adjustments.
14 However, due to the combination of shifting
15 standards, altered assessments, and diminished
16 resources, we have had to rely on a less
17 predictable method of reviewing our curriculum.
18 The priority now must fall to where is
19 the primary accountability from the state's
20 perspective. So, most recently, in the last four
21 years, we have had to delay looking at state
22 standards for social studies, art, and physical
23 education because our resources were best put
24 toward mathematics and language arts. Most
25 specifically, we'd like to look at a scope and 146
1 sequence across the entire curriculum, from grades
2 K through 12. In doing so, this process has
3 amounted in the school district investing nearly
4 four hundred thousand dollars in elementary
5 language art and mathematics alone. This is a
6 sizable investment from our district, and it makes
7 working with other levels much more challenging to
8 find those resources to make the necessary
9 changes.
10 At this time, Dr. Deisley will speak
11 about his experience from Red Lion Area.
12 DR. DEISLEY: Our example is similar to
13 Ms. Wentzel’s. We utilize a five-year curriculum
14 rewriting cycle, and as the standards change, we
15 have to reallocate our resources. So, each year we
16 budget about two hundred thousand dollars to our
17 curriculum cycle. That accounts for, in a
18 five-year cycle, about 20 percent of our curricular
19 areas. Well, if we need to address, say, English,
20 language arts two or three times in that five-year
21 cycle, that means something else gets pushed off.
22 So, the talk about the constant changing of the
23 standards has been a problem for us financially and
24 for keeping up with our cycle.
25 Now, we do recognize the fact that the 147
1 PSSA and the Keystone Exams only assess a narrow
2 representation of the standards, and that’s what we
3 are encouraged by the idea of an ongoing process
4 and review here. But when these assessments are
5 constantly changing, the validity of the PSSA
6 scores or the Keystones is also questionable.
7 We ask ourselves, How can progress be
8 measured when there are changing measures of
9 achievement? We need consistency so we can work
10 towards improving student achievement, and these
11 changing -- constantly changing academic targets
12 create an environment that does not allow for
13 measuring student achievement over years.
14 It’s also important to note that while
15 all the attention is focused on the standards for
16 English, language arts, and mathematics primarily,
17 and biology, there are also ten other sets of state
18 academic standards, most recent of which were
19 approved in 2006. So, although we are talking
20 about just a few sets here, there are many more out
21 there.
22 It’s also important to note that the PA
23 Core and state academic standards provide the
24 foundation upon which the entire student, school,
25 school district, teacher, and principal 148
1 accountability system is based. State and local
2 tests, value-added assessment system, the teacher
3 effectiveness system, school performance profiles,
4 on and on and on, these all factor into this. A
5 great deal rides on the quality, clarity, depth,
6 and breadth of the state standards and, of equal
7 importance, the consistency in those standards over
8 time.
9 What also must be clearly understood is
10 that the state standards are not the curriculum.
11 School districts have and continue to develop and
12 approve their own curriculum and local
13 assessments.
14 So, we believe an ongoing process to
15 review the expectations established for
16 Pennsylvania students and schools is appropriate
17 and necessary, and therefore urge approval of House
18 Bill 177. However, we also urge members of this
19 committee to consider carefully that should the
20 commission call for major changes to the standards,
21 this committee must seriously contemplate the
22 emotional, financial, and educational costs such
23 changes will have on the students, parents,
24 teachers, and schools resulting from moving the
25 academic bullseye the fourth time in six years. 149
1 So, on behalf of PASA, we thank you for
2 your consideration.
3 DR. ESHBACH: And in conclusion,
4 Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators,
5 short and sweet, we support both Senator Tobash -
6 I’m sorry, Representative Tobash, Representative
7 Grove’s bill.
8 We thank you for your support of this.
9 And we are intrigued by the conversation and want
10 to move forward.
11 Thank you.
12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: I want to
13 thank the panel for their brevity of the
14 presentation. Great job.
15 And Representative Tobash.
16 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: I will be brief
17 as well. And I do appreciate. I’ve heard your
18 voice many, many times, and that’s why we brought
19 this legislation forward. So I appreciate your
20 testimony very much.
21 Sometimes I say it like this: Teaching
22 our children isn’t like putting together widgets.
23 These are the misguided implementation of what we
24 all want, and that’s relevant, applicable
25 learning. I sometimes equate this to telling your 150
1 research and development department not to think on
2 their own. And I think that is misguided.
3 So, I have also seen these NOCTI exams
4 that we are administering in vocational schools.
5 And when I look at them, I think, boy, so many more
6 people should know this information, so many more
7 students should be guided into this area.
8 So, I appreciate your acknowledgment of
9 that, your testimony today. And thank you very
10 much for your support.
11 DR. ESHBACH: Thank you.
12 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
13 Representative Grove.
14 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: I must say, the
15 "bad case of state policy whiplash” is probably the
16 single best line I’ve heard in a testimony in my
17 career here. So, I applaud it. I love it. And it
18 highlights trying to build consistency in
19 education.
20 And I’m not familiar with your school
21 district. I know the York County School District’s
22 here presenting, are big on innovation, thinking
23 outside the box and driving academic achievement.
24 I think that’s the great direction we need to go
25 in. 151
1 I’ll look forward for the continued
2 discussion. Obviously, the scope of it isn’t doing
3 an overhaul of state academic standards, it’s to
4 try to provide some review, you know, time frame,
5 when is that best done. So, obviously there’s
6 further discussions that need to be done on the
7 focus of the bill.
8 And I appreciate your input and, of
9 course, your continued service to better our
10 education.
11 Again, I applaud that line. I love
12 it. I may steal it many times.
13 So, thank you.
14 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
15 Mr. Chairman.
16 Thank you all for your testimony.
17 My first question was related to an
18 earlier comment. You mentioned something about
19 what your hearing is that people want our
20 graduating students to be able to do critical
21 thinking and stuff like that. Who are you hearing
22 that from? I understand it’s anecdotal kind of
23 stuff, but -
24 DR. SNELL: I think we oftentimes,
25 whether we read it in the press or we hear from the 152
1 business community that there's any number of
2 skills that our graduates need to know and be able
3 to do beyond algebra I, and so it is about how do
4 you work in a team and how do you collaborate and
5 communicate in this 21st century with technology.
6 So, it is a byproduct, we think, of
7 this innovation, this entrepreneurship that we are
8 embracing and trying to make sure that our learners
9 understand, in a customized way. You can go down
10 whatever path it is that you want, but in this day
11 and age, you need to learn how to do these skills
12 beyond the book work, if you will.
13 DR. ESHBACH: And from the Northern
14 York County perspective, we recently went through a
15 strategic planning process, not the comprehensive
16 that the state requires, but a true strategic
17 process of listening to our constituents.
18 We brought in a group of business
19 owners to talk to them about what -- what they need
20 and underscore exactly what Dr. Snell said, the
21 need for those soft skills, the ability to be
22 creative, the ability to collaborate, the ability
23 to communicate, and the ability to think critically
24 were things that they said, We're not seeing enough
25 of, from our students, and how can you help us? 153
1 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: And I’m not
2 disagreeing with the importance of that, but
3 wouldn’t you say the basic skills of being able to
4 read and write and do mathematics would be kind of
5 a prerequisite to developing those skills?
6 DR. ESHBACH: We think that they
7 shouldn’t be done exclusively, but they should be
8 done together. You can teach the skills of reading
9 and writing and arithmetic in a way that is done
10 through collaboration and critical thinking, et
11 cetera. So, absolutely, they are -- they are
12 essential. They can be done together. They don’t
13 have to be mutually exclusive.
14 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Okay. But,
15 then, I’m going to go back to the question I have
16 been asking every other group. If -- I kind of see
17 those things as kind of -- I don’t think you can
18 get to critical thinking without the basic
19 understanding of math and reading and writing.
20 If the students aren’t able to achieve
21 proficiency or advanced levels on the tests, what
22 do you think the reason is that they’re not able to
23 do that? Is it a problem with the test, the
24 curriculum, the teaching, the families, the
25 students? Where do you think the problem lies? 154
1 DR. ESHBACH: All of the above. You
2 know, we -- we are unique in that we are not a
3 business. We’re not dealing with widgets. We
4 educate whoever comes through the door and no
5 matter what their background, no matter how they
6 enter the school. So, there are a number of
7 reasons that lend to that.
8 Some of it is that, as of yet, our
9 students that are taking these Keystones don’t
10 realize the -- the weightiness of passing them. We
11 are working on that.
12 Some of it is curriculum that isn’t
13 aligned to the tests. We’re working on that. It
14 takes time. And then we have had those
15 conversations with our school board members. It’s
16 not going to change overnight. It will take time.
17 But there are a lot of factors that go
18 into this, and we’re addressing them each as we -
19 as to how we can improve assessment scores.
20 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Okay. That’s
21 helpful. Thank you.
22 REPRESENTATIVE STAATS: Thank you,
23 Mr. Chairman.
24 And, first, I’d like to thank you for
25 your testimony and the testimony of everyone today. 155
1 As a new member of this committee, this hearing’s
2 been very insightful.
3 Again, j ust a quick question regarding
4 the project based assessment. I think I heard you
5 say that you weren’t sure where or who would design
6 that project. It’s my understanding that it would
7 be designed by the school; is that correct?
8 MS. WENTZEL: Just so you know, at four
9 minutes to 11:00 this morning, we receive an e-mail
10 from the department, highlighting that the
11 problem-based assessment, or the PBA, that one of
12 the UI units within the state of Pennsylvania is
13 offering the service that you can pay for per child
14 to receive the tutoring through the process.
15 There is -- there’s a lot of gray area
16 around what this looks like. And as trying to
17 manage a business, trying to figure out what it is
18 we exactly have to do to provide it, has been very
19 challenging. And, to be honest, I am encouraging
20 my high school to actually take a little bit more
21 of a wait-and-see approach until we have a little
22 bit more information.
23 When you have these e-mails that come
24 out, you know, that feed little bits of -- little
25 bits of information at one time, it becomes very 156
1 difficult to say: This is the direction we need to
2 go .
3 And then we are going to receive
4 another e-mail that says, but it’s now -- now we’re
5 going to get another one that says the locals can
6 decide what that project looks like.
7 REPRESENTATIVE STAATS: So it’s not
8 clearly defined.
9 DR. ESHBACH: It’s not clearly
10 defined. We’ve had some school districts in our
11 area, in the capital region, that have volunteers
12 to pilot what that might look like.
13 One superintendent expressed to me that
14 after thirty hours of a student working to a level
15 of frustration towards that project-based
16 assessment, they said: That could be close to
17 cruel and inhuman punishment. We’re going to back
18 off until we get further clarification.
19 I think -- I’ve used this phrase a lot
20 lately, but we’re in a "ready, fire, aim” mentality
21 from things that are coming to us from Harrisburg.
22 And we just need that pause. We just need to get
23 some clarification and to wait and see and make
24 sure that we’re doing things that are best for
25 students, not just a knee-jerk reaction. 157
1 REPRESENTATIVE STAATS: Thank you.
2 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
3 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
4 Representative Rapp.
5 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you,
6 Mr. Chairman.
7 Thank you for being here today.
8 And I wanted to ask you, too, about the
9 project-based assessment. My one child went
10 through career and technical center, and he had to
11 do a project. He was welding, so I was going to
12 ask if that could possibly be considered as one of
13 those projects, since they’re going through career
14 and technical.
15 And the other thing I want to ask, are
16 your students exhibiting any type of apprehension,
17 knowing that this is coming, that regardless of all
18 the years they spend in career and tech and they’re
19 proficient and some of them, you know, go to
20 states, go to nationals, you know, through career
21 and tech, but they can’t pass the Keystone Exam.
22 So, when you make the statement that
23 the Keystone Exams used as graduation requirement
24 ensure standardization and denies the student the
25 right to his or her path in life, I agree 158
1 wholeheartedly with that statement.
2 So, I welcome your comments.
3 DR. ESHBACH: And, please, make it
4 clear, we are not against accountability by any
5 sense of the imagination.
6 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: And neither am
7 I.
8 DR. ESHBACH: And then -- but the
9 question you had about whether a welding project
10 would be used for that project-based assessment, my
11 understanding is no. It has to be in biology,
12 English literature, or algebra I. That’s why we’re
13 a little unclear as to what a project-based
14 assessment will look like in those areas.
15 But we think there are multiple ways to
16 show proficiency in multiple areas. The passing of
17 NOCTI exams requires a keen ability to read and
18 understand technical journals that should be looked
19 at as -- as achieving proficiency on a reading
20 assessment. It’s not looked at that way.
21 PDE has looked at it strongly enough to
22 be able to include NOCTI exams and your performance
23 on NOCTI exams on the SPP but not towards
24 proficiency on a Keystone.
25 So, again, getting a range of advice 159
1 and suggestion and no clear guidance.
2 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you. I
3 appreciate your answer.
4 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
5 Representative Tobash, another question.
6 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: I had a
7 comment. And it's not for your testimony. We're
8 finished with that.
9 But I'm pressed on time here. I would
10 normally never leave a hearing, particularly that
11 has to do with my bill, but I may have to leave in
12 the middle of the next testimony. I wanted to
13 apologize to the chairman and to the committee.
14 The testimony that we've heard so far has certainly
15 been important as, I think, we move this issue
16 forward. And I thank you very much. But I do have
17 something back in my daughter's home school
18 district that I need to be at at 2 o'clock. And
19 thank you.
20 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Very good.
21 Thank you, Representative Tobash.
22 Again, thank you, panel, for your
23 testimony today. Appreciate it very much. And
24 thank you for what you do.
25 DR. ESHBACH: Thank you for the 160
1 invitation.
2 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: The next
3 panel to testify is Pennsylvania School Board
4 Association, with William LaCoff, who’s president
5 of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association; and
6 John Callahan, who is the senior director of
7 governmental affairs for the school boards
8 association of Pennsylvania.
9 And you may begin whenever you’re
10 ready.
11 MR. LACOFF: Good -- pardon me. It
12 changes. Good afternoon. I’m Bill LaCoff,
13 president of the Pennsylvania School Boards
14 Association. And with me today is John Callahan,
15 PSBA’s director of governmental affairs.
16 PSBA represents the 4,500 elected
17 school board members who govern our state’s public
18 school districts. We are a membership-driven
19 organization that works to support reforms for the
20 betterment of public education and to promote the
21 achievements of public schools, students, and local
22 school boards.
23 My thanks to Chairman Saylor and this
24 committee for giving PSBA the opportunity to speak
25 to you regarding two important pieces of 161
1 legislation that we support, House Bill 168 and
2 House Bill 17 7.
3 Out of respect to the committee’s time,
4 seeing how thing have run, I’m going to speak as
5 fast as I can, and I’m going to try to edit my
6 remarks on the fly.
7 I will begin my comments today by
8 addressing House Bill 168.
9 PSBA agrees that the implementation of
10 Keystone Exams should be modified to lessen their
11 high-stakes impact on high school students. House
12 Bill 168 accomplishes this by removing the state
13 mandate for Keystone Exams to be used as a
14 graduation requirement.
15 For all districts, the exams would
16 still be used to meet federal accountability
17 requirements in the same way that the Pennsylvania
18 System of School Assessment tests are used for
19 grades three to eight. And House Bill 168 would
20 not prohibit the school district from using the
21 Keystone Exams as a graduation requirement or to
22 determine the weight needed to receive a diploma if
23 the district wished to use them for this purpose.
24 We believe that tests do not have to be
25 high stakes -- do not have to have high-stakes 162
1 consequences to be meaningful. Testing should
2 inform and enhance, not impede, instruction.
3 The written comments that we provided
4 to you today include a review of relevant research
5 findings that show there is no scientific basis to
6 rely on high-stakes tests for measuring student
7 performance or granting a diploma. In fact, the
8 benefits of the high-stake tests have been small or
9 nonexistent, and the research has shown many of the
10 negative consequences of high-stakes testing.
11 There is no definitive evidence that
12 college enrollment rates increased with high-stakes
13 tests. There are many students who perform well in
14 the classroom and can demonstrate proficiency
15 through various locally developed measures but do
16 not score well on standardized tests for various
17 reasons.
18 And I’m going to add anecdotally, I do
19 super well on standardized tests. My youngest son
20 does not. And he did so poorly on some of these
21 standardized tests -- SAT, for example -- that I
22 secretly questioned if he was college material.
23 Well, not only is he college material,
24 he’s got an MBA from a highly respected
25 university. I found out yesterday that the -- he’s 163
1 a money manager. And he’s got forty-seven billion
2 dollars under management. But he was terrible on
3 these standardized tests.
4 And the use of high-stakes testing
5 forces schools to focus instruction on test
6 preparation. They have less time to teach
7 important skills that cannot be measured with
8 standardized tests, such as writing research
9 papers, public speaking, or conducting laboratory
10 experiments.
11 It also takes times and money away from
12 opportunities to provide other programs, including
13 music and art, and the narrowing of the curriculum
14 is most severe for low-income students. And it
15 reinforces inequity, particularly among low income
16 and minority students. And there is a relationship
17 between high-stakes testing and an increase of the
18 drop-out rate. And I believe the last statistic I
19 heard was an increase of 12 percent in the drop-out
20 rate or failure to graduate. We’ll get back to
21 you.
22 In addition to the unnecessary negative
23 consequences for students that are associated with
24 high-stakes testing, the committee must also
25 consider the financial impact of the program that 164
1 has been created in Pennsylvania.
2 PSBA supports provisions of House Bill
3 168 that would eliminate the requirement to develop
4 seven additional Keystone Exams, which would be an
5 expensive and time-consuming process. The state
6 has already spent and continues to spend millions
7 each year to provide, analyze, and report results
8 of the three existing Keystone Exams in addition to
9 the PSSAs and Classroom Diagnostic Tools.
10 And from a budget perspective, fact is
11 that the state dollars are scarce and scaling back
12 the Keystone Exam program is reasonable and
13 practical.
14 Reducing the number of exams does not
15 diminish the importance or ability of students to
16 demonstrate proficiency in other academic content
17 areas. Reducing the number of Keystone Exams
18 simply means that there will not be state-mandated
19 standardized tests associated with the content.
20 Schools will continue to provide instruction in
21 these areas and will determine, at the local level,
22 how those assessments will be conducted.
23 At the local level, districts are faced
24 with additional costs to implement the graduation
25 requirements for the three Keystone Exams. New and 165
1 continuing costs are imposed as districts continue
2 to adapt their curriculum and instruction to be
3 aligned with the new academic standards and
4 assessments and to update textbooks and materials.
5 There are staff professional development and
6 training costs to be considered as well.
7 Additionally, school districts are
8 already facing many new costs related to
9 implementing project-based assessments that school
10 districts must use for students who do not score
11 proficient on a Keystone Exam or who were opted out
12 on taking exams for religious reasons.
13 The PBA is a mandate under Chapter 4
14 regulations, and PDE has created extensive
15 processes and rules for implementation. If the
16 requirement for Keystone Exams as a graduation is
17 eliminated, there is no need to continue the
18 requirement for completion of PBAs. The PBA is an
19 online testing system that does not allow teachers
20 to consider other measures of student performance
21 or the needs of diverse learners in determining
22 proficiency; instead, it places that decision in
23 the hands of state-selected review panels, and
24 districts must make huge investments of money,
25 time, and staffing to implement the online PBA as 166
1 well as the necessary technology.
2 School districts must implement the
3 infrastructure to support the mandated PBA
4 process. They must designate district assessment
5 coordinators, school building assessment
6 coordinators, test administrators, and teacher
7 tutors. Training is required for staff in each of
8 these roles.
9 A great amount of recordkeeping is
10 required to determine timeliness for completion,
11 provide notifications, schedule sessions, and
12 monitor students to ensure they have participated
13 in the PBA and completed their goals. It can take
14 ten hours or more for a student to complete a PBA.
15 And it must be done at school in the presence of a
16 test administrator. Each student must have a tutor
17 who is a teacher certified in the subject area that
18 the student is testing in. If done before or after
19 school or during the summer, cost and time issues
20 must be considered.
21 Another problem is the amount of time
22 necessary for each PBA to be evaluated by the
23 state-wide review panel. It can take eight to ten
24 weeks for the panel to evaluate a project. If the
25 panel decides the project is unsatisfactory, the 167
1 student must redo and resubmit.
2 And I want to summarize some of the
3 impact at Owen J. Roberts, my local school
4 district. I’m president of their school board as
5 well. A student who’s proficient in all the three
6 exams that we have mentioned will spend
7 approximately forty-three hours preparing for and
8 taking three Keystone Exams and other high school
9 assessments to prepare for college. But a student
10 who is not proficient on these tests during the
11 first attempt, could spend, minimally, a hundred
12 and sixty-three hours preparing for and taking
13 three Keystone Exams twice, completing three online
14 PBA assessments, attending three classes of
15 remediation, and completing other assessments to
16 prepare for college. Now, that might be the worst
17 case example, but it can happen.
18 The faculty and administration will
19 spend minimally one thousand thirteen hours for the
20 administration of the Keystones, the roster
21 verification process and the administration of the
22 online PBA assessment.
23 And I think one of the most important
24 bullet points I can make here with you today is
25 that our high school guidance office has not been 168
1 contacted by any Pennsylvania or, for that matter,
2 out-of-state college or university requesting any
3 student’s Keystone Exams scores. So, it may be
4 high stakes for us, but apparently not high stakes
5 for the universities.
6 Now, I want to move my comments now to
7 House Bill 177, that calls for the review of the PA
8 Core Standards by a newly created academic
9 standards commission. Much has been said by -
10 much has been said by various stakeholders, both
11 for and against, about the creation of the national
12 Common Core Standards that were originally adopted
13 by the Pennsylvania State Board of Education in
14 2010.
15 Since 2010, however, the state board
16 amended the national standards to tailor them more
17 closely to Pennsylvania’s specific educational
18 needs. The current version of the PA Core
19 Standards became effective in March 2014.
20 Certainly, academic standards are not
21 new to Pennsylvania. The state board adopted its
22 first standards that became effective in 1999. And
23 more standards evolved subsequently to that. PSBA
24 supports House Bill 177 because it provides an
25 avenue for further public review and an opportunity 169
1 to suggest adjustments, if necessary. It’s
2 important to understand that the state and school
3 districts have invested time and money in efforts
4 to implement these standards. Curriculum frame
5 works, materials and resources for new school
6 teachers and administrators have been developed and
7 now are being used.
8 And anecdotally, my wife taught school
9 for thirty-three years, most of it in
10 kindergarten. And made a clever remark, not
11 entirely accurate, just a personal reflection, that
12 we would bring in a program to the school, try it
13 for two or three years, it would fail, they’d get
14 rid of it. Ten years later, they bring it back
15 with a new name and, not surprisingly, it would
16 fail again. So, developing — you know, we’re
17 recycling failures is what I’m afraid of.
18 In closing, I want to emphasize that
19 PSBA supports efforts to appropriately measure
20 student attainment of state and local academic
21 standards. We believe that this can be done using
22 multiple measures of accountability and without the
23 use of state-mandated, high-stakes exit exams.
24 The state needs to provide local school
25 districts with maximum flexibility to make 170
1 educationally sound decisions that expand
2 opportunities for students without an overreliance
3 on standardized test scores, high-stakes tests and
4 a narrowing of the curriculum or prescriptive
5 mandates.
6 I might also add that I was at a
7 national conference where they were talking about
8 the reauthorization of ESEA, and, of course, that
9 means No Child Left Behind, and this is the same
10 approach nationally they’re trying to take: It’s
11 local control and the end of the reliance of high-
12 stake testing.
13 And once again, thank you for the
14 opportunity to speak, however rapidly I did it.
15 And I’m pleased to answer any of your questions.
16 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
17 Representative Tobash.
18 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you.
19 Thank you for going so quickly. And I
20 do have a little bit more time.
21 So, number one, I just want to go on
22 record here as saying that I do encourage schools
23 to utilize the three exams that are out there to
24 the best of their ability, but, I believe, and what
25 we’re saying here, that we should have an 171
1 additional degree of local control and autonomy
2 within our school districts. I do believe in
3 measurement. It’s important. And I really believe
4 in applicable, relevant learning. I’m just
5 certain, after digging so deeply into this issue,
6 that these exams are not getting to that -- that
7
8 Again, I appreciate your testimony.
9 I’d love to hear about success of students that
10 have taken different paths. I can tell you that if
11 we had the forty-seven billion that your son has
12 under management in our pension system, we could
13 worry more about education and less about some of
14 the funding concerns that we’re talking about.
15 MR. LACOFF: I don’t want to do a
16 commercial, but we could be better off if some of
17 it was there.
18 By the way, I agree with your remarks
19 about the local control and the importance of
20 evaluating the students. We just have to be
21 sensible about how we do it.
22 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you,
23 again.
24 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
25 Representative Truitt. 172
1 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
2 Mr. Chairman.
3 If you've been here earlier, you
4 probably can anticipate my question. I'm having a
5 hard time extracting from different testifiers
6 during the day where you think if 35 percent of our
7 students or 45 percent of our student can't pass
8 these tests, do you think it's fundamentally a
9 problem with the tests, the curriculum, the
10 alignment of these things? Where do you think it's
11 breaking down?
12 MR. LACOFF: My answer is yes. And I
13 don't mean to duck that question, but we're -- we
14 have a multitude of students, and we have a
15 multitude of school districts, and the problems
16 cannot be reduced to a single cause.
17 We do need rigor. I believe in that.
18 And maybe what we see is the residue of a failure
19 of rigor ten years ago. I don't know about that.
20 But we also have to respect the ability of the
21 people on the ground to know what's going to help
22 their students succeed and what measures are
23 important.
24 The difficulty is deciding how rigorous
25 are we going to be and are we going to look over 173
1 people’s shoulders to make sure we’re not just
2 passing people along because they’re difficult.
3 So, I apologize if my remarks sounded
4 glib, but the problem is it’s a multi-pronged
5 problem, and it’s going to take a multi-pronged
6 answer.
7 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: That is the
8 pattern that I’m hearing today. I am a co-sponsor
9 on the bill to repeal the graduation requirement
10 mainly because I don’t think we fully understand
11 why kids aren’t passing the tests, and that gives
12 me pause when we’re going to start making it a
13 graduation requirement starting in 2017.
14 And but -- you know, I look at it -
15 I’m just going to -- for my -- just to share my
16 opinion. One of the things that falls -- one of
17 the arguments that falls a little flat on me is
18 that there’s big expense associated with
19 remediating students. I think we owe students an
20 education, not a diploma. So, if they’re failing
21 the test because we’re not actually teaching them
22 the material, that’s one thing. But if they’re
23 failing the test because the tests are irrelevant,
24 that’s a different thing, or if it’s a problem at
25 home that’s not good. 174
1 That’s why I keep asking this question
2 as I’m trying to understand, you know, where that
3 breakdown is. But I see the pattern emerging here
4 today.
5 MR. LACOFF: I don’t want to interrupt
6 John, but that long, prescriptive way that we have
7 to handle the PBAs if a student doesn’t pass, maybe
8 that’s too much. Maybe locally we could determine
9 a better way.
10 And I agree with you, just because a
11 student hasn’t passed doesn’t mean we’re going to
12 give up on them. We’ve got to find some
13 remediation. Remediation has value. But if it’s
14 so prescriptive that we waste time, energy, money,
15 and, you know, the student’s attention span is
16 exceeded, then we didn’t get anywhere. So, I’m
17 speaking about local control rather than
18 prescriptive methods for remediation.
19 MR. CALLAHAN: And two points,
20 remediation, we believe, is important. We’re not
21 going to give up on that. You can’t give up on a
22 child. You have to go through remediation. Again,
23 having local control is probably the best way to do
24 that.
25 And to your second point, I’d like to 175
1 say, we kind of just skim the surface on some of
2 the research on the tests themselves, but, I
3 think -- I mean, I spent hours, probably, just
4 reading through research over the past three weeks,
5 and it just keeps on going. So, there’s plenty of
6 other answers out there about assessments. They
7 seem to be getting better, but there’s still a
8 search for how to do this right.
9 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: That’s fair.
10 Thank you.
11 MR. LACOFF: Let me bring another
12 anecdote in. You just reminded me. I’ve had so
13 many jobs, you probably think there’s something
14 wrong with me I can’t keep a job. But one of them
15 was to -- I was on a team that wrote the civil
16 service exam for promotion for sergeant and
17 lieutenant of the New York City Police Department.
18 And we went through the research, as John
19 describes. We read all the books. We read the
20 laws. But one of the key issues was to ride with
21 the officers daily, to see what happened to them on
22 the street, and how the rules and the guidelines
23 impacted actual officers. So, that was a matter of
24 getting -- getting down to where the rubber meets
25 the road, literally in this case. The closer you 176
1 can get to the problem, the more likely you are to
2 find a proper solution.
3 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
4 Mr. Chairman.
5 Thank you.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
7 Representative Rapp.
8 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Thank you,
9 Mr. Chairman.
10 I really appreciate you going a little
11 bit more in depth to these project-based
12 assessments. I guess I didn’t realize the whole
13 involvement when they were first mentioned by the
14 state board. It just seemed kind of, you know,
15 something -- a project that you had to do, but the
16 way you’ve outlined this, it’s very much in depth.
17 Can you kind of give me kind of an
18 example of what a child would have to do for a
19 project-based assessment, what exactly is
20 involved?
21 MR. LACOFF: There’s test prep.
22 I mean, I could repeat some of the statistics that
23 were provided by my assistant superintendent at
24 Owen J. Roberts, but, basically, there’s test prep,
25 and then there’s hours sitting in front of the 177
1 computer to perform the test, and there’s
2 monitoring for it. So, if the student -- and I
3 think I gave the worst case example. If the
4 student has to do this for three courses, for all
5 three courses, minimally he’s going to sit in front
6 of the computer for ten hours each.
7 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: So -
8 MR. LACOFF: If we’re going to just
9 throw a child in front of a computer that’s
10 failed -
11 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Exactly.
12 MR. LACOFF: -- you’ve got to devote
13 time and energy from the professional staff to get
14 that child ready.
15 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: Especially if
16 that child is not proficient in reading.
17 MR. LACOFF: Yeah, exactly.
18 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: And that was my
19 point. I don’t know if you were here when I asked
20 the question before, how do we expect children to
21 learn by just sitting them in front of a computer
22 without actual instruction from a teacher actually
23 being there. So, they’re actually, instead of
24 passing the test on paper, you’re just expecting
25 them to read a lot of information and then do the 178
1 same thing on the computer? Is that what you’re
2 saying?
3 MR. LACOFF: Yes. Pretty much.
4 It’s -- it’s -- it’s not getting to the
5 nub of the problem.
6 REPRESENTATIVE RAPP: No, it doesn’t
7 appear.
8 Thank you very much.
9 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: Thank you.
10 I thank the panel -- excuse me -- I
11 thank the panel for your testimony and appreciate
12 your brevity as well.
13 And the next board or group to testify
14 actually is Mr. Dave Patti, who is the president
15 and CEO of the Pennsylvania Business Council.
16 REPRESENTATIVE TOBASH: Thank you,
17 panel.
18 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
19 MR. PATTI: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
20 As you said my name is David Patti, and
21 I’m president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Business
22 Council. Delighted to be spending Abraham
23 Lincoln’s birthday with you. Sorry I’m the only
24 thing standing between you and lunch.
25 I will -- I’m going to summarize -- 179
1 everyone has the testimony -- and try to break it
2 up between the two bills and just kind of comment
3 and give some ideas and then some reflections,
4 having heard the other testifiers.
5 Let me start, you know, putting on my
6 hat as a former poli-sci professor. One of the
7 things that occurs to me today while this hearing
8 was called on two distinct pieces of new
9 legislation, this has really become an oversight
10 hearing. And I think that's a good idea.
11 We have two phases always, policy
12 design and policy implementation. We have already
13 been working to implement this policy that was
14 designed several years ago. And what you heard
15 today from everyone who testified was different
16 examples of where they think perhaps implementation
17 is failing. That's really important for you to
18 know.
19 Two things might happen. We might go
20 back and say, Gee, we have to change the design.
21 Maybe we made a mistake when we designed the
22 policy.
23 But the other possibility is, maybe we
24 just didn't implement it really well. Maybe we
25 went overboard. You know, maybe we went too far 180
1 this direction, too far that direction. Maybe
2 there was unintended consequence we didn’t think
3 about. Maybe we need a little more time, you know,
4 but that doesn’t mean we throw out the policy
5 design.
6 So, I think today’s hearing was very
7 valuable, and if we separate our thought process,
8 we might say, okay, here’s what we like. Here’s
9 the way we’re going to keep on going.
10 Now, I will turn first to
11 Representative Grove’s bill, and I want to log the
12 intent. I can’t say enough about what the
13 Pennsylvania Business Council and I think all
14 people who work in public policy believe about
15 public input. You have to have as much public
16 input as possible, and you have to have that input
17 be as interdisciplinary as possible.
18 And, in fact, education policy is
19 unique with only this and environmental policy,
20 where we don’t have the department itself acting by
21 itself, where it’s not just the administration and
22 just the governor making policy, but we have the
23 Environment Quality Board and the state Education
24 Board that were conceived thirty years ago, I guess
25 it was, forty years ago, in the very basis of the 181
1 idea we have to get more input. We need parents.
2 We need law makers. We need practitioners involved
3 in the design of those policies.
4 And it’s important, I think, to
5 remember that in this particular case with the
6 academic standards, the state board had many, many
7 hearings, had many, many groups. The sad part is
8 that a lot of people didn’t pay attention to it at
9 first, and that’s unfortunate, but there were lots
10 of opportunities.
11 I think the other thing we want to
12 think about is that Pennsylvania is fairly unique
13 and, I think, incredibly far ahead of virtually
14 every other state in that we also have the
15 Independent Regulatory Review Commission. That’s
16 an amazing way to protect democracy and protect the
17 legislative process and those in the regulated
18 community from an overly aggressive regulating
19 body, where we have a second check on the whole
20 process, where we say, Now, wait a minute. We’re
21 not just going to do whatever the executive agency
22 wants to do. We’re going to go get more input.
23 And so let’s remember also all the
24 hearing we had there. And if memory serves me
25 correctly, IRRC took, I think, something like four 182
1 hundred or in excess of four hundred public
2 comments on the standards and made the department
3 respond to all four hundred in writing, and then
4 had another hearing on that. So, we have had a lot
5 o f input.
6 So, while I think the idea of a panel
7 is good and I’m not going to object, I also think
8 it’s kind of redundant and not necessary in this
9 process. And I would also worry about if we create
10 a commission on just this thin -- relatively thin,
11 although very, very important, part of education
12 policy, would we break up other things. And what
13 happens if the commission on standards doesn’t talk
14 to the commission on testing, which doesn’t talk to
15 the commission on teacher development and training,
16 and now we have all these silos that aren’t
17 interconnected. So, the one thing that’s important
18 about the state board of education is that they
19 have to connect all of those things. And that
20 becomes important in a second part of my testimony
21 when we talk about the Keystone Exams and how they
22 also link to school performance profiles and how
23 they also link to teacher evaluations. Because we
24 have crafted our public policy in a way that it
25 interlinks. And so there’s an interdependency. 183
1 So, 177, I think, it was drafted for
2 all the right reasons. I don’t personally believe
3 it’s necessary. I think we have taken care of the
4 concerns that it seeks to address. And I would
5 leave you with those thoughts.
6 168, the exams, we have been on board
7 with the exams for, you know, nearly a decade, when
8 they were in a conceptual phase, when they were
9 called end-of-course exams. I have for you a lot
10 of polling.
11 I would just point out to you, again,
12 we start in this process in 2009 with Susquehanna
13 polling, who a lot of you know. Jimmie Lee, the
14 owner, who interviewed -- his staff interviewed
15 four hundred business people for me. When he
16 designed -- when we laid out for them the
17 conceptual question and asked them, Would you
18 support -- and I’m quoting now from that survey -
19 new guidelines that would require high school
20 students to meet certain statewide requirements to
21 prove they’re proficient in basic skills by passing
22 a series of common final exams in reading, math,
23 science, writing and social studies in order to
24 graduate, 80 percent of the business leaders of the
25 four hundred business leaders we interviewed said 184
1 yes. And that was our kind of leaping-off point
2 into all of this.
3 We have asked a very, very similar
4 question of the public, six hundred voters in
5 Pennsylvania, every year for the last three years,
6 and I record their results there. It started high,
7 dipped a little bit as Common Core came under some
8 challenges. It’s going back up. That’s -- you
9 know, I don’t want us to be guided by public
10 opinion alone, but I think that’s important for you
11 to understand that.
12 And we have sent to the general
13 assembly for the last three, four years documents,
14 a regular newsletter on public policy called the
15 Inside Policy. We have tried to keep sharing this
16 information with you throughout that process.
17 We had supported originally the first
18 version, where it was pass six out of ten tests,
19 with the idea that, in fact, students should have
20 some flexibility in picking the sciences and more
21 advanced mathematics courses.
22 We have acquiesced to the three because
23 they seem to be the most fundamental, and I would
24 go to Representative’s Truitt’s comments, if you
25 can’t read, write, and do basic math, it’s hard to 185
1 do anything else.
2 And we’ve always seen this as end-of-
3 course, not the high-stakes Regents type thing in
4 New York, where you do it at the end of graduation,
5 find out, you know, in May that you’re not going to
6 graduate. But let’s fix the problem as we go.
7 I understand Representative Tobash’s
8 belief that we shouldn’t think of children as
9 widgets, and that would be a sensitivity we would
10 all want. But if you think of any other process in
11 business or in anything in daily life, you don’t
12 wait till the end to find out if did you it right.
13 Cooks taste things as they go to make sure they’re
14 on track. You know, in industry, we will be
15 testing constantly and fixing a problem before it
16 gets to the end of the line. And you don’t think
17 about passing it onto the end-use customer in a
18 defective state.
19 And we have children. We’ve heard lots
20 of people talk about the need for remediation that
21 is costing a great deal of money. Is it -- would
22 it be a dire unintended consequence for kids not to
23 graduate from high school and not be able to go on
24 to post secondary because of the exams? Yes. But
25 I think it’s equally dire, and we knew we already 186
1 had the problem that were going on not ready, and,
2 in fact, using up their money that they have for
3 college, using up their federal and state and
4 private sector loans and grants and scholarships on
5 remedial classes before they could move on, so that
6 they didn't have the resources to move on.
7 Their parents, their families, all of
8 the public of Pennsylvania have already paid for
9 that education. Let's make sure they're ready to
10 move on. And that's not necessarily the fault of
11 teachers. That's not necessarily the fault of the
12 schools. There are a lot of factors. So, I'm
13 going to answer your question yes also. It's all
14 of the above. But let's try and address those
15 factors.
16 I do think it's important to remember,
17 though, also that fail safes here, the fact that we
18 thought about the unintended consequence of barring
19 somebody from graduation when this was stepped up
20 from just an end-of-course exam or being one-third
21 of a grade to the full of graduation, and, yes,
22 there's remediation, which I think is incredibly
23 important. Let's fix as we go.
24 I don't know how you take algebra II,
25 trigonometry, geometry, calculus if you aren't 187
1 proficient in algebra I. I don’t know how you take
2 advanced courses in social -- the social sciences
3 if you can’t read and write very well and aren’t
4 mastering those skills and aren’t proficient.
5 So, that’s important, but we have said,
6 You get the second bite at the apple on exams. An
7 I think we need to remember, too, you don’t
8 necessarily take the whole test. You take the part
9 that you failed. So, that these are -- I don’t
10 know that modularized is a word, but made into
11 segments, you know, much like a CPA exam or
12 something else. You go back for that part. And
13 the conceptual model is, go back, address the
14 issues, the key issues you don’t know, and move
15 on.
16 If that didn’t work, we have the
17 project-based assessment. And it just occurred to
18 me, so I’ve not had time to research this, but I
19 will turn to those of you on the committee or even
20 someone in the audience who would know better.
21 Haven’t we had -- just now getting rid of -- of a
22 graduation project requirement for about ten years
23 in the state of Pennsylvania. And I think that was
24 for all five hundred school districts, so all of
25 our students have been graduating after doing a 188
1 project of some sort now. And I’ve not heard any
2 complaints about it. I’ve never testified at a
3 hearing about it.
4 So, if somebody has made this
5 project-based assessment tougher, maybe we need to
6 talk about the project-based assessment, but it
7 doesn’t mean that, conceptually, a project-based
8 assessment is a bad alternative and because we
9 believe in local control.
10 If all else fails, we are allowing
11 superintendents to still give a student a high
12 school diploma. So, you can fail the test, you can
13 take remediation, fail the test again, not satisfy
14 the project-based requirement, and your
15 superintendent can still give you a high school
16 diploma. I believe that that probably means very
17 few people wouldn’t graduate. And if, in fact,
18 they’ve gone through all those steps and their
19 superintendent doesn’t give them a high school
20 diploma, maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe they
21 shouldn’t graduate. Maybe they need more time.
22 And that’s where Representative Tobash
23 is so true. Kids aren’t widgets. It’s not a
24 hundred eighty days for all of them. Unfortunately
25 we have this kind of model of a hundred eighty for 189
1 this year and a hundred eighty days -- some of them
2 need more time. If that’s the case, that’s the
3 case. And we’ll have to deal with that.
4 But I would encourage you as the
5 committee and the Senate committee and the new
6 administration to look at the discrete things that
7 we’re doing. The exams themselves, are they
8 correct? Didn’t we go overboard? The project-
9 based assessment as a discrete piece of this puzzle
10 and say, Let’s look at those and make sure they
11 meet the project -- I’m sorry, the public policy
12 design that we started with, and if not, let’s
13 address those and fix those problems. And then if
14 there’s things that still tell us that we have to
15 redesign the policy, do so.
16 But I think also, I would encourage
17 you, and just in closing, talk about the other
18 sides. We believe very much in the accountability
19 for the school districts and the teachers as well.
20 And most of the teachers are doing a great job.
21 Some teachers could do a better job if some of
22 their weaknesses were identified.
23 We were part of a group that said, if
24 we’re going to evaluate teachers, we have to do
25 more than have a principal come in once or twice a 190
1 year and have a little checklist and "yes" or "no"
2 essentially. And so, teacher evaluations are now
3 based, 15 percent, on performance. If we don’t
4 have a good assessment and an assessment in which
5 we know there was real effort by the children,
6 frankly, if we don’t know that the student’s have
7 skin in the game, you know, how do we use that to
8 fairly evaluate a teacher? It’s just not fair.
9 And for school profiles, the performance matters.
10 And we’re doing that at the building level. How do
11 we know, if we don’t have a valid assessment tool,
12 that we can really fairly and appropriately compare
13 school districts to school districts and buildings
14 to buildings within a school district?
15 So, we have, concurrent to the design
16 of these standards and the implementation of the
17 Keystone Exams, come up with other public policy
18 that’s linked to it. And I think we’d have to
19 think about, if you throw something out, what does
20 that do for these other areas of accountability
21 that we’ve tried to move into.
22 I understand the concerns about cost,
23 and somebody on the last panel, I think it was,
24 said something about the cost. And I, frankly,
25 forget the exact number. I have in my head two 191
1 hundred million dollars that we spent on designing
2 tests. That’s a lot of money. We spend twenty-
3 seven billion dollars a year in this commonwealth
4 of local, state, and federal money on K-12
5 education. If I’m worried about two hundred
6 million, that’s seven-tenths of 1 percent of that
7 twenty-seven billion. Is seven-tenths of 1 percent
8 to make sure that we’re on track and we’re actually
9 getting something from twenty-seven billion so the
10 kids can read, write, and do math and they’re ready
11 to move forward appropriate? I think that’s a
12 bargain.
13 So, I leave with that. And I’d be
14 happy to take some of your questions.
15 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
16 Representative Grove.
17 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Thank you,
18 David. Always good testimony and founded in -
19 obviously, you back it up very well.
20 What I’m trying to drive at with 177 is
21 when and how do you review effectiveness of what
22 you do, and how do we do that with academic
23 standards. You know, give year review? Is it
24 ten-year review? Do we wait until first graders
25 graduate and wait three years after that for 192
1 classes to do it? How do you do it effectively to
2 make sure we are doing the right thing?
3 MR. PATTI: Well, and it may not endear
4 me to some of you, I think Representative Rapp was
5 not wrong when she noticed commonalities to
6 outcomes-based education. Some of the testifiers
7 talked about the fact that we whipsaw people -- and
8 I was going to use whipsaw instead of whiplash
9 but -- every few years in administrations. But I
10 think there’s been more commonality than
11 difference, as I’ve been here to watch from
12 Thornburgh to Casey, from Casey to Ridge, from
13 Ridge to Rendell, from Rendell to Corbett, and now
14 Corbett to Wolf.
15 In theory, in 1998, ’99, whenever we
16 were doing what we now call academic standards,
17 there was supposed to be a four-year review
18 process. Like so many things in Harrisburg, we
19 didn’t quite stay with the schedule. But I -- you
20 know, I think if you think about anything else and
21 certainly if you use a business model, we want
22 continuous process improvement. No mater how good
23 the standards are today, no matter how good we are
24 today, we should keep re-benchmarking.
25 Someone testified about the NAEP 193
1 scores, and on our Pennsylvania score card, when
2 our organization created fifty-one metrics of
3 competitiveness to compare Pennsylvania across the
4 other states, four out of fifty-one on fourth grade
5 and eighth grade math and language arts measures.
6 So, we think those are very, very important
7 scores.
8 And I think you do need to keep
9 evaluating all the time, are we on track. Those
10 scores, which only come out every two years, gives
11 us some kind of idea to also say, hmm, if we're
12 going down, is that because other states are doing
13 better or we're doing worse? You know, sometimes
14 you're just doing the same as you always did and
15 other states try harder. But that would be a good
16 signal that we should be looking at the standards
17 and looking at our assessments and looking at our
18 instructional methods, looking at our instructional
19 materials.
20 And, again, to Representative Truitt's
21 point, it's not just the standards, it's not just
22 the exams, it's a lot of things.
23 REPRESENTATIVE GROVE: Thank you.
24 Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
25 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: 194
1 Representative Longietti.
2 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: Thank you,
3 Mr. Chairman.
4 And thank you, Mr. Patti, for your
5 continued commitment to trying to do the hard work
6 of advancing education for our children.
7 Question, when Mr. Miller, the teacher
8 from Cumberland Valley, testified, he shared some
9 statistics. I don’t know the methodology of his
10 survey, but he said that 83 percent of the teachers
11 in that school district that he surveyed opposed
12 the Keystone Exams, and half of those, half of that
13 83 percent, strongly opposed.
14 Obviously coming from the business
15 community, if you had a situation in a business
16 where the employees at that level did not buy in to
17 what was being implemented, that would be a very
18 serious concern.
19 What can be done, in your view? Do you
20 have any suggestions on the whole buy-in process?
21 I know he, at one time in his
22 testimony, indicated something about maybe it would
23 be helpful to have a local council or group that
24 included teachers, local business people, higher ed
25 folks to identify what they expect out of kids when 195
1 they graduate.
2 I’m concerned about those numbers
3 because, anecdotally, I don’t have the survey that
4 he does, but when I walk around my district, I hear
5 common complaints from teachers that they’re not
6 particularly excited about Keystone Exams.
7 MR. PATTI: Well, I think there’s a
8 couple of thing going on there. So, let me answer
9 it kind of backwards. There are -- we run
10 something called the Pennsylvania Business
11 Education Partnership. There are local
12 partnerships in a lot of communities. I’m not
13 familiar with one in that part of Pennsylvania,
14 that would include Cumberland Valley, but there
15 should be. And those are sometimes Chamber of
16 Commerce-based organizations. They are sometimes
17 workforce-investment based.
18 So, a lot of the WIBs, the state
19 work -- I’m sorry, the local workforce investment
20 board in the commonwealth -- we have twenty-two of
21 those -- and they are designed to have educators,
22 business leaders, labor leaders, faith-based groups
23 come together to talk about the workforce overall.
24 That, I think, is often thought of as just sort of
25 a job training/vocational kind of style. But it’s 196
1 supposed to be all elements of education. And we
2 have to do a better job. And this is for another
3 day, but we have to do a better job of tying the
4 vocational and educational, what we think, you
5 know, together there and workforce.
6 So, there are some elements or some
7 tools for doing that. And we can do a better job
8 of that.
9 We see across the commonwealth probably
10 more pushback, I think surprisingly, on the
11 Keystone Exams from the districts that do better
12 and the wealthier districts than from the districts
13 that struggle and have less resources. So, in
14 suburban Philadelphia, there’s Chester County,
15 Delaware County, Montgomery County areas giving a
16 fair amount of pushback to the exams, Cumberland
17 Valley, other places.
18 And I think -- and this is completely
19 understandable, that people are going to say, look,
20 we know what we’re supposed to do. We went into
21 this vocation because we know what we’re supposed
22 to do, because we care about kids. We’re going to
23 show up every day, whether I’m a teacher, an
24 administrator, a school board member, we’re going
25 to work hard to educate our kids well. We don’t 197
1 need another government program.
2 And, you know, after No Child Left
3 Behind, it’s seems like it’s the whiplash thing,
4 you know. Now what -- give us the -- give us the
5 flavor, just get out of the way, let us do our
6 job.
7 And so, I think I understand that from
8 a teacher’s point of view of, you know: I don’t
9 need this. And at the micro level in the
10 classroom, that may even be true. At the macro
11 level across the commonwealth, I mean, one of
12 things that was attractive to the business
13 community and the military about Common Core and
14 about aligned assessments is that people don’t stay
15 in one community anymore. They move around a lot.
16 And so, Cumberland Valley’s a great school
17 district, does a wonderful job for its students and
18 everyone should be applauded.
19 That doesn’t mean that a student who
20 moves there from another district will have quite
21 the same kind of situation. And sometimes they
22 don’t have a choice in that, you know. Sometimes
23 people move just because they want to be in a
24 better school district, and sometimes the job or a
25 military deployment takes them somewhere else. 198
1 So, that was part of the idea. That
2 was the common part. Not that our children are
3 common, but that there would be at least a floor.
4 Hopefully everyone’s trying to exceed the floor,
5 but a floor that in any school district things
6 would be there for the students. To make sure that
7 that floor’s in place, that puts burdens, frankly,
8 on a school like Cumberland Valley. Say, you know,
9 Look, we know we’re a little past that floor.
10 Don’t worry about you. But how do you document
11 that and check that?
12 And that’s where I think, again, where
13 we have to be careful about the bureaucratic
14 responses, that we don’t so bureaucratize that
15 process of just making sure everyone’s at the
16 floor, at least, and that we take away the freedom
17 to go much beyond that.
18 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: I’m
19 certainly going to think more myself about that
20 issue, how we buy in.
21 MR. PATTI: I think it’s what you are
22 seeing in polling, though, across the country, and
23 there are groups that have been polling teachers as
24 well, is that as it’s rolled out and they get
25 accustomed to it, that the buy-in is increasing. 199
1 There is an organization -- I’ll talk
2 to you off line, because I don’t remember the name
3 and I don’t have the website here -- there’s an
4 organization in DC that has been tracking that kind
5 o f thing.
6 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: Last
7 question I want to ask is -- it’s something that
8 representative Truitt’s been hitting on and you
9 kind of addressed it. Is there a — I understand
10 that we need to develop basic skills, and that a
11 diploma has to mean a baseline of something. Are
12 we crowding out the other things? I mean, we just
13 heard again testimony from the school
14 administrators saying, you know, we’re hearing that
15 what really is needed today is creative thinking,
16 critical thinking skills, how to communicate across
17 cultures, innovation, entrepreneurship, et cetera.
18 And they’re feeling frustrated that that’s all
19 getting crowded out because there’s an overemphasis
20 on things like the Keystone Exams and assessments
21 and that sort of thing.
22 Could you speak to that at all?
23 MR. PATTI: First of all, I concur
24 completely with what the gentleman said. We do
25 need all those things. And he was absolutely right 200
1 to say he heard that from the business community.
2 I hear that everywhere. And my counterparts in
3 other states say the same thing. That's what we're
4 working for. So, that's absolutely correct.
5 The test, there is no requirement,
6 unless I'm missing something, in state law or
7 regulation for the test prep and how to take a test
8 and all that strategy. And so that wasn't a policy
9 design. That was a decision at the local level
10 that we want to score well on these because we're
11 going to be evaluated on these things. It's a very
12 human response. I get that. But that was a local
13 decision to take hours out of the day to do those
14 things so that we can look at parents and go, Oh,
15 look, our test scores are better than everybody
16 else's, because part of it's the content and part
17 of it is probably strategy, you know.
18 So, I think the school districts have
19 to look within themselves. It's fun to point to
20 the capital and go, Oh, it's those guys in
21 Harrisburg. It's their fault. I don't think you
22 passed a law that said they had to do test prep.
23 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: But we have
24 incentivized -
25 MR. PATTI: That's fair. And they 201
1 might say that, and say, Well, we’re afraid our
2 funding’s going to be based on this or other
3 things.
4 We haven’t done any funding on that.
5 We don’t -- that would -- that would actually
6 suggest we have a funding formula, which is going
7 to be a future hearing.
8 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: I think
9 somebody fairly can look at, I think, what we’ve
10 done and say that we have, at least, implied -
11 MR. PATTI: Yeah, I think that’s right.
12 And that’s the idea of accountability, you know,
13 that we do want them to do well and score higher.
14 And it’s also true that the scores probably are
15 going to go down in the beginning, with higher
16 standards.
17 Being one of the oldest people in the
18 room, I guess, I remember when we ran the hundred-
19 yard dash. When we switched to the hundred-meter
20 dash, it looked like the times were slower. No,
21 the distance was farther, you know. And that’s
22 part of what we’re going through with Keystones.
23 And we are pushing people further. And so, the
24 scores aren’t comparable to the past. And we are
25 going to have to understand that. And I think, 202
1 over time, the scores will look very, very good,
2 and as everyone gets used to the system and gets
3 used to the distance.
4 But, again, I would say, you know,
5 maybe we have to go back and say, you know, did we
6 go too far? Virtually all of us, probably,
7 certainly took algebra, took -- probably took
8 biology, and we certainly all took languages arts,
9 whatever it was called back then, whether it was
10 just reading and writing, and we somehow got
11 through and still were in clubs and still in sports
12 and still in the band, and still in everything
13 else.
14 So, I, frankly, can’t explain, and I’m
15 not expert enough, and I’m not a public school
16 teacher or superintendent or school board member to
17 explain why that still can’t happen today. I think
18 expectations should be high, but I think students
19 still should be able to do all those things and -
20 and I would concur with the criticism that says, if
21 they’re not able to do those things, they’re losing
22 some very valuable experience, life lessons, things
23 that will make them a better, wholistic person,
24 more ready for college, post secondary education,
25 and careers, just as the biology and the 203
1 mathematics and the language arts will.
2 REPRESENTATIVE LONGIETTI: Thank you
3 very much. And once again, I appreciate your
4 commitment to trying to improve our educational
5 system.
6 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR:
7 Representative Truitt.
8 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: Thank you,
9 Mr. Chairman.
10 And thank you, Mr. Patti. It’s great
11 to see you.
12 It really pains me to be at odds with
13 the business community on this particular issue,
14 because I truly believe that our state’s economic
15 survival demands that we’re better preparing our
16 children for an increasingly higher and higher tech
17 world. We’ve got to get our workforce in line with
18 the needs of our business community. And I see why
19 this is an essential step in that process.
20 But from talking to my constituents,
21 parents, we get this impending sense of like we’re
22 on the Titanic and the iceberg is now -- you know,
23 2017 is getting really close in terms of how fast
24 education and government moves. So, I feel like,
25 at a very least, we need to push the iceberg a 204
1 little further away before -- because the numbers
2 just seem so high, the number of kids that aren’t
3 passing these tests.
4 And I’m wondering if there isn’t
5 some -- and you guys have been through it, hearings
6 after hearings after hearings. I wonder if there
7 isn’t some middle ground that we can find, at least
8 for the short term even, that maybe if school
9 districts were offering two different diplomas,
10 like a Keystone diploma and a local diploma, so now
11 the business community can distinguish the students
12 that passed the test from the ones that didn’t. Or
13 if there was a menu of tests, like they either have
14 to pass the Keystone Exams or have to pass the
15 NOCTI. Do you think there’s any room out there
16 or -
17 MR. PATTI: There is always room to
18 discuss other options and everything. There are
19 states that do those kinds of differentiated
20 diplomas. I mean, then you -- you know, I’m sure
21 we’ll have another hearing about the disservice
22 we’re doing to those who have the -- what’s
23 perceived to be the lesser of the diplomas.
24 I do -- I want to concur. I know it
25 scared Representative Rapp when she concurred with 205
1 PSEA. I think I’ve already concurred with PSEA on
2 not whipsawing teachers back and forth and all.
3 And I’ll concur with Miss Boise and say that the
4 vocational education is something that’s incredibly
5 important to us, and, in fact, when we were
6 discussing the Keystones and the standards, the
7 business community don’t always find all the
8 engineers they want or at the price they want them,
9 but for the 25 percent of the jobs in the
10 commonwealth of Pennsylvania that require a
11 four-year college degree or even more, an advanced
12 degree, more or less we find those people and have
13 those peoples.
14 The real difficulty -- and testifier
15 after testifier said this — is those middle jobs,
16 those golden collar jobs that we talk about. Those
17 jobs that require more than a high school diploma
18 but less than a four-year degree, maybe some
19 specialized training. And the interesting thing,
20 this is the same problem the military has, there’s
21 something called the Lexile score, which is used to
22 measure the complexity of the reading material.
23 The reading material for the military manuals and
24 for welding textbooks and other vocationally
25 oriented textbooks is higher than that of college 206
1 freshman liberal arts textbook. It is more
2 difficult to read. And so, that was part of the
3 emphasis on the reading.
4 The mathematics -- and one of the
5 hearings last year, I forgot if it was a House or
6 Senate hearing, the operating engineers from
7 western Pennsylvania, so people who run road
8 graders and cranes and things like that testified.
9 Well, if you are doing the grading for a big
10 construction project or a highway, you need to
11 understand algebra and geometry. It's critical,
12 because the degree of the slope goes to your own
13 safety while you're making the slope, but it also
14 goes to, you know, the speed at which cars can
15 drive safely on a road afterwards or, you know,
16 various elements of the project, the stormwater
17 runoff and environmental protection and all kinds
18 of things. They were finding that they were
19 struggling finding students ready to enter
20 apprenticeship programs who could do the math that
21 was necessary for that.
22 So, a lot of the people who have been
23 involved in this and thinking about this haven't
24 been thinking about it for the engineers and the
25 doctors and the lawyers. They've been thinking 207
1 about it for those great jobs that we need to fill
2 that are really good family-sustaining jobs and
3 that Pennsylvania needs to drive the economy
4 forward.
5 If this is somehow hurting those
6 individuals who could deliver that, then I think we
7 need to look at that, and those are valid
8 questions. But the design wasn’t to penalize those
9 young people. It was, in fact, to make sure that
10 people were prepared for those careers. It was
11 quite the reverse.
12 REPRESENTATIVE TRUITT: I think it’s so
13 important that get our work force aligned with our
14 business community. We really — this committee
15 ignores your input at our children’s peril, so
16 thank you for being here today. I do appreciate
17 hearing from you.
18 MR. PATTI: Thank you.
19 MAJORITY CHAIRMAN SAYLOR: In closing,
20 I want to thank Dave for testifying today. I
21 appreciate it.
22 Today’s hearing, I want to reiterate,
23 was on House Bill 168 and House Bill 177. There
24 are a lot of topics -- this is the beginning of the
25 year -- that all of us have interest in discussing, 208
1 but today was not the day to discuss No Child Left
2 Behind or federal mandates or state mandates.
3 Those are all of interest, I think, to members of
4 this committee, and we will work with Chairman
5 Roebuck and the rest of the committee as we move
6 forward to any number of hearings.
7 But I want to thank all the
8 who came forward and gave their time today and
9 their expertise to this. We may all have differing
10 opinions on different pieces of legislation, but it
11 is important that we keep focused on the fact that
12 we’re talking about our children and giving them a
13 real world-class education.
14 So, I, again, thank everybody for
15 coming and look forward to working with everybody
16 as we move forward.
17 Thank you.
18 (Whereupon, the hearing concluded at
19 12:50 p.m.)
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