I got an email last night from Leo Casey at the United Federation of Teachers, informing me that the UFT had just received a dump of emails from the New York City Department of Education, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Leo noticed that Deborah Meier and I were mentioned several times in the emails and so he shared the trove with us.
Pretty ugly stuff. Read it here, in two parts, if you can open a google document:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1Ghj5xYLG5Ka0c2RUJLWHhNSmM
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1Ghj5xYLG5KcjZTem95WjZnUUU
The first thing I noticed was the chummy exchanges between the public officials in change of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership–the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the leader of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the leader of the New York City Charter Center, and various others. It comes clear that there is a strong and concerted effort to hand over as much public space as possible to the charters. The charter leaders are not the poor and oppressed of New York City; they are the powerful and monied, and the public officials who are paid to protect and support the PUBLIC schools of New York City are working hand-in-glove to advance the interests of the privately-managed charters, not the public schools. You will also notice, in one of the emails, that the charters are very concerned to make sure that there is no cap on their executive compensation. Heaven forbid! It’s important that their leaders continue to pull down $400,000 a year to oversee a few small schools.
The collusion between those who are sworn to protect the public schools and those who are incentivized to privatize them is surely the most important thing to be gleaned from this correspondence.
For me, the other interesting point is that they are so afraid of any criticism. They are especially afraid of Deborah Meier, me and Jonathan Kozol. They refer to columns by Deborah Meier and myself–she an educator with decades of experience, I a historian with a long view–as “moronic” and “idiotic.” They refer to Jonathan Kozol and me as “deranged crackpots.”
How can anyone take these mean-spirited, ignorant, arrogant people seriously?
The only thing frightening about them is that they are clamoring–with some success–to take control of the education of innocent children. Now, that is really scary! That is the scary thing that happened last night.
Diane
It discredits no one to call them a hedge find manager. some people are indeed hedge fund managers.
What is discrediting is to work to harm public schools, to take away from a public responsibility, to promote privatization. That harms us all.
Diane
If you go to Gary Rubenstein’s blog, he has debunked your assertions.
Gary Rubinstein debunked Harlem Success Academy and other “miracle” claims in this review: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/03/20/my-review-of-class-warfare-in-the-journal-of-school-choice/
I was responding to Gideon. Sorry for the confusion.
Tom, I supplied the link to Gary’s article. Your correspondent has an unfortunate habit of being insulting. He has to do that in his own space and on his own time, not mine.
I have standards.
Diane
[...] Ravitch notes the nasty names that charter advocates called her and other critics in emails. (DR’s Blog) [...]
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Tom & Diane,
Rubinstein, in his blog, states the following:
“..on page 303 Brill cites a study in which students who applied for a charter lottery and won were compared to students who applied for the lottery and lost. He said that the ones who won did better than the ones who lost, which seemed to prove “Same demographics, same motivation, different results.” But this is just what I’d expect. The more important comparison is to compare students who entered lottery and lost to students who never entered the lottery. All this study proves is that if you isolate the most motivated kids, they will perform better than they would if they were mixed in with the others.”
That’s actually not what the study proves at all and it’s a ridiculous reductionist excuse for a very rigorous study that controls for selection bias. Rubinstein must not have actually read Hoxby as she actually DOES compare those students who entered the lottery and lost to the average (e.g., those who never entered the lottery). (See IV-12 of Hoxby.)
-Gideon
I spent 10 years with Caroline Hoxby on the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. It is a very conservative group that believes in choice and testing. Hoxby is a brilliant economist who always concludes that school choice works. Others, including the equally brilliant Margaret Raymond, disagree. Many, many others disagree. I disagree. I concluded, having been on that side of the fence, that choice destroys communities and will end up creating a dual school system. Charters select by lottery and charters accept small numbers of students who are likely to get low scores. Charters kick out kids who don’t conform. Our society doesn’t need privatization. Our society needs a vibrant public sector. Meanwhile, Gideon, since you are not likely ever to agree with anything I have to say on the subject, I suggest you start your own blog. Or pay attention and learn. You could start by reading my last book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” You don’t have to agree with me. And you are not arguing, as Monty Python might say. You are just contradicting. At a certain point, that becomes truly boring.
Diane
Here’s a quote from IV-12
“All in all, the lotteried-out students start out on or somewhat below proficiency threshold, and they
make enough progress to end up a little above or on the proficiency threshold. Indeed, relative to
the proficiency threshold, they improve slightly in both subjects. They are not falling further behind
other students, as we might expect. On the other hand, they are not closing the achievement gap by
much: their achievement starts out quite far below that of the average Scarsdale student and the gap
stays quite wide.”
This is consistent with what I implied in the review. ‘Lotteried-out’, for people reading this, is students who applied for lottery and lost. The main point of the paper is that ‘lotteried-in’ kids do better than ‘lotteried-out’ kids. My point was that this is expected because ‘lotteried-out’ are higher achievers than (continued)
students who never applied to the lottery. This passage shows that the lotteried-out did do better than those who hadn’t applied.
Also, very interesting in this paper is how she dodges if students in lottery have higher prior achievement than kids who don’t enter it. See II-4
“People are often interested in the prior test scores of students who apply to charter schools because
they would like to know whether a district’s high-achievers or low-achievers are disproportionately
applying to charter schools.
Unfortunately, there is a serious problem with studying the prior test scores of charter school
applicants. Because students do not take tests until grade three, we only have prior test scores for
students who apply to grades four or higher from another New York City public school. This gives
us prior test scores for only 22 percent of applicants. There is just no guarantee that such applicants
are typical of charter school applicants. Logically we expect them to be atypical because they are
disproportionately students who are not applying to an intake grade.
It would be unwise to use data on only 22 percent of applicants to draw conclusions about how
charter schools affect the student population that attends traditional public schools. It is simply
impossible to compare the prior test scores of the average charter school applicant to the average
student in New York City.”
Does this apply to Hoxby’s study?
In Texas, in those charters that conduct lotteries, every entrant in the lottery is someone whose parents have decided they need to be moved.
So, were such a study to be done in Texas, there would be a pre-selection bias simply by having chosen to be in the lottery.
Why is this important? When I was more deeply involved int he research, the single best criterion for whether a student would have success in school was the number of books in the student’s home. Of course this had nothing to do with whether the students actually read the books, but instead is a marker of the education and, consequently, interest in the student’s education, by the parents.
If the parents care enough to try to move the student, that care alone is often enough to goose student achievement.
So I still wonder about Hoxby’s study: Was there any control for pre-selection bias? I don’t see it. If it measured only those who were involved in the lottery, win or lose, if that lottery required that the parents apply for the lottery, everyone involved was pre-selected.
I’m waiting for the charter school that comes along and offers to take a random sample from the public schools, with no application process. That would allow a straight up comparison.
But as I noted earlier, here in Texas the public schools are doing as well as, and often better than, the charter schools. For every successful charter in New York that has performance above the state average, we have three charters in Texas that perform below the state average.
I suspect that, nationwide, “choice” programs that suck the lifeblood out of public schools, as most charter programs do, will cripple the overall educational achievement of the schools affected, the public school districts, and the state.
Schools don’t need fewer resources, and if schools are failing as charter school advocates claim, re-arranging the deck chairs on the Education Titanic cannot reasonably be expected to produce national gains.
What really works? Smaller classrooms, interested parents, time on task, good teachers. Nationally we have massive movements towards larger classrooms, in Texas, California, Wisconsin and other places, We have testing designed to get parents out of the way, we have testing that reduces time an task, and we have formal movements from Gov. Scott Ahab Walker in Wisconsin and Gov. Rick Perry in Texas to get rid of teachers at random, especially good teachers who have advanced degrees and experience that cost more in teacher pay.
Charter schools help not at all.
Mr. Darrell:
You mention books in the home as an indicator. Are you familiar with Professor Krashen’s work on this subject?
Not as familiar as I should be, no.
Not as familiar as I should be, no.
By the way, my current school, Molina High School in Dallas, is mostly poverty students. We prove that badly-paid teachers, working under the whip, without the special resources granted to charter schools, can perform better than charter schools in getting school achievement up among students in poverty.
I doubt all the gains will obtain through college, however, because aid to students in poverty to get to college is being hammered, and the kids can’t get summer jobs to help out.
Again, charter schools provide a drag on cementing any successes.
I just went on fportelos web and tried to leave a response to him, but apparently I’m not computer wise enough to get through. I was absolutely shocked to find what this young man and others were/are going through. I have been solo as a teacher, but none ever put me in a “Rubber Room”. His first mistake was depending on his untion.
Al Shanker sold out the teachers and students years ago when he joined with the Triladeral Commission. (He told me so in LA). He also supported charter schools for the lower %tile students, but never once did he consider why some of these poor and minority children were in the lower %tile
He supported, years ago, a teacher evaluation designed at U of GA (I ordered) that can only be compared to the “Skinner” rat lab. NEA has even been worse. They take the overworked teachers money, but do nothing to support them or education. These two unions are worthless in my opinion. I speak from experience and researched knowledge.
While I was in my MA program to become a Reading Specialist, a great professor told us when we found a child with a reading problem to ask the child what he/she thinks is the problem She said most test will not show the problem, but the child will, in most cases, know his/her problem. She was so right! When did we lose faith in our children’s intellect?
Some children would say: “I can’t hear the sounds”, so I knew I had to teach another way other than phonics. Some children would say, I can read, but I can’t understand what I’m reading, so I knew I had to zero in on comprehension skills. Every child has his/her own individual way of learning, but the present system has no place for the individual child or the gifted teacher. This system of education will not only destroy representative government, it will destroy talent.
[...] from Diane Ravitch’s blog, there is this post on the same subject: I got an email last night from Leo Casey at the United [...]