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
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Their fear of criticism is an admission that their empty claims are vulnerable. But how many millions and how much in human resources do we have to waste on their fads and nostrums that could be going to benefit children instead of wreaking destruction on students, teachers and schools? It’s insanity, and will be regarded in hindsight as a period of madness — if our educational system survives the assault.
I teach my students that ad hominem attacks says more about the accuser than the accused. Their use of terms such as “deranged,” and “moronic” speak volumes about their credibility, wisdom, and ability to run democratic institutions.
No wonder they have been fighting to make NYC schools less democratic — they’d have to listen to public intellectuals like her, not to mention teachers, parents, students…You know, the little people.
I love the way you think.
Check out Gideon Stein’s background on Wikipedia. It’s all about making money.
“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.” Exactly.
Yet they all mug for the cameras and whine for the microphones that it’s all about rescuing the children from the clutches of the evil teacher’s unions. And what better place to target than failing schools in minority neighborhoods where there is nobody to stand up to them — errrrrr… I mean where need is greatest… These people are some of the lowest character dregs since the snakeoil salesmen of the bad old days
Diane,
I am touched by your classy response to Klein and company’s cruelty. Stay strong — you are so important to teachers!
When language disintegrates into name calling it’s a clear signal that the name callers realize they are losing ground, fast. Unfortunately, this is also an indication that meaningful conversation has ended. In an attempt to protect hefty pay ($400k goes far even in NYC), students are sacrificed. Inherent inequality makes people protect their tiny corners of the word with vicious, irrational actions and words.
Wishing Finland had an open immigration policy.
Diane,
This is amazing and audacious stuff. And your response is spot-on. Thanks for sharing.
They will run many good educators out of the profession as corporate types take more and more control of the public school systems. You can not trust them as far as you can throw them. The scary part to me is that they are and probably will get away with it. They have co opted both major parties at the the national level, governors of both parties are on the attack, the teachers’ unions (with a couple of exceptions) are also on board, and local politicians who stand up for community schools are targeted.
Sadly, nobody takes these characters as seriously as they take themselves. It’s their vast, nay, unlimited storehouses of prized, expropriated, and privatized American booty, as well as our own purient interest in what they choose to do with the swag, that makes them somewhat important, and certainly neither the quantity nor quality of their thinking on the subject, Diane. I call it, “War of the Rosebuds”: the really, really obscenely, uselessly rich, not just Hollywood rich, are with us — always, like the force. And not to mix my metaphors, the world is their snowglobe to shake or stir as they wish, and for as along as they wish, or until they crack, and fade to black.
I feel like a newcomer to this whole scandal and corruption as I came under attack from January 2012 to now. What started off as a simple question about budget to my principal has lead to a whole adventure uncovering many wrongdoings in the DOE in just a few months. After calling in certain investigations and FOILing administrators per session time cards I have now landed in the Rubber Room. Yes they exist..trust me I sit in one awaiting charges for 2 weeks now. Others are there for months with no charges. http://protectportelos.org/2012/05/06/children-first-always/
I now see I have a new mission and it may be fighting outside the classroom.
Bottom line is President Obama and his Ed Secy Duncan gave this a MAJOR push with RttT. I think teachers and especially teacher unions need to be much more aggressive against the Ed. policies of Obama/Duncan. The upcoming Presidential election is predicted to be very close. I think it should be made clear to Obama that he can’t take teacher’s votes for granted.
I think that more teachers should think on their own free will and not follow what the union or others dictate to them. I realize that most are overworked and have been overwhelmed with the massive paper work required in this noneducational travesty of core cirruculum and standardized test that require them to teach to the test. Stand up and fight like teachers and educators for the children and for your country.
Ann I agree. I’m fighting tooth and nail in Staten Island and basically solo. The union has lost grievance after grievance including one last week where the DOE is violating their own Regs C-770 and sending me out of my district. I write this while recently assigned to the Rubber Room after bringing to light financial misconduct among other things in my school. The more I uncovered the more they threw at me. I wish the UFT took a stronger stance to fight back. However most teachers won’t fight back. Even my supporters back at Berta Dreyfus IS 49 are under attack for just supporting me and liking my posts on Facebook.
If our children spoke thus to others at school, even if they disagreed with them, it would either be cause for a teachable moment or detention. Shame on those who do not speak with good purpose in the education arena.
You are exactly right. When people speak of others in such an unpleasant way, it reflects poorly on the speaker and his upbringing. I was brought up in a household where we were always told to mind our manners. I try to do that. I don’t always succeed, but I try
Diane
Keep fighting the good fight Diane! EmaIls like those make me think they’re scared of your influence if they have to talk like that!
I promise you: I will not be intimidated by their money or their bullying. I have dealt with bigger challenges. And I’m still here.
We have to find ways to take back our schools one step is being pursued by a group called Dumpduncan.org. Here is what they have to say:
President Obama:
WE DEMAND:
An immediate end to high-stakes student testing and the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student scores as a basis for evaluating teachers, preferring charter schools to existing public schools, and requiring closure of low performing schools.
The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
The incorporation of parents, teachers, and school administrators in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
Create a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of America’s schools.
*****
Parents and educators, sign the actual Letter to Obama at: http://dumpduncan.org/
Incorporating parents, teachers, administrators is fine but what about incorporating students? Students make up more than 90% of K-12 (rest being adults) and are 100% of the reason schools exist. Why is this majority marginalized? Unless youth themselves are part of WE in “WE DEMAND” nothing will change for the better. No major change in history has happened without substantial youth involvement. The fact that all the responders to this post ignore youth’s energy, intelligence, and passion is what will doom public education, not the greedy 1%.
Actually, we welcome students and have many who help recruit signatures and many who have signed the letter to Obama. The readers of these blogs tend to be adults and our statements here are directed to that audience.
Klein is currently coordinating Rupert Murdoch’s response to News Corporation’s hacking/bribery/corruption scandal in Britain. Klein’s resignation as chancellor, the hiring of Klein to run Murdoch’s education division at News Corp., and News Corp’s purchase of Wireless Generation all happened quite quickly. It would be interesting to see the emails surrounding all of these deals.
This current crop of Klein emails released yesterday, along with the Klein/Eva emails Juan Gonzalez FOIL’ed for the Daily News two years ago, exposes the closeness between Klein and the charter industry.
But the Murdoch/Klein nexus is the most interesting to me, because it is an open example of Klein making money off his own education reforms (he’s being paid $4.5 million by Murdoch, according to the NY Times) while also making money for his boss, Murdoch.
According the Times, Murdoch told Klein he would be happy if education accounted for 10% of News Corp’s revenue in the near future.
That was definitely the plan before the hacking/bribery/corruption scandal threw a monkey wrench into the gears and forced a delay in the News Corporatizing of the school system in NY State and elsewhere.
But they’re still going to try and get there once they think they have put the hacking/bribery/corruption scandal behind them.
Klein is the point man, with the connections both in and out of government, to make Rupert a happy, happy man in this regard.
And I am sure Governor Cuomo having made a Tony Blair kind of deal with Murdoch wherein he pursues policies that Rupert likes and Rupert offers the support of his papers to Cuomo won’t hurt News Corp’s business interests in education either.
So many people are ready to swallow their propaganda whole that it’s really difficult, as an educator, not to succumb to despair as things continue to get worse, year after year.
Not surprisingly, your comments are misleading, Diane. There is no “they” who referred to you and Kozol as crackpots. It was only Whitney in an email he sent to 4,000 followers. Why not just present honest facts?
The emails are posted at the links. Anyone can read them. I don’t name names. People who read can see who said what.
Perhaps you should identify yourself, Gideon, in the interest of full disclosure. You are not a disinterested observer.
Diane, I used my full name and gave my work email. I am Gideon Stein and I am no less disinterested in this than you are. Why do you say “they” indicating multiple people referred to you as a crackpot when it was one person? No one else in those emails called you that.
Gideon Stein
President
FIN Schools
I assumed you were the person of the same name who is on the board of a NYC charter chain. Also a hedge fund manager. Forgive me for the error.
Diane
I remember you now.
I had to block you on Twitter because of your insulting comments.
The only reasons I block people are
1. Porn
2. Commercials
3. Insults
I don’t tolerate any of them.
Diane
What was the insult? Quoting your comment on testing where you indicated that Texas got better tests b/c they paid more?
[…] Ravitch commented on her blog about the email dump: […]
Diane, thank you for all that you are doing. Remember, that principled, ethical people do not resort to name calling. You are not dealing with nice people when you object to the corporate, foundation take over of public schools. Keep up your good work by continuing to expose those who put “money” above democratic principles and children.
Diane, I am the same Gideon. In addition to FIN, I am on the boards of Success as well as Green Dot New York (as well as several other education and philanthropic orgs). Just don’t know why you use the pronoun “they” when referring to one person.
I’m not a hedge fund manager, though.
Your total focus on the pronoun leads me to the conclusion you agree with the contention of Ms. Ravitch’s blog: … the closeness between Klein and the charter industry.
Actually, I was making the opposite point. Ms. Ravitch seems to indicate some sort of conspiracy suggesting that “they” are calling her a crackpot when it’s just one person.
More to your point, these emails are anything but a smoking gun. Why not show the tens of thousands in which the DOE is discussing district schools? I bet you’d find that the proportion of Kleins emails roughly matches the proportion of district to charter schools. Why is everyone so threatened by charters in NYC? Oh yeah, they perform so much better an have similar student demographics.
Mr. Stein, you may be able to pull that argument off with people who know very little about schools. You can not in good conscientiousness believe charter schools in NYC serve the same type of kids and have equal resources. Why do people have to make huge salaries and reap other private economic benefits from funds for public education. You really think all this profiteering and greed are going to make schools better? “They” who target people like Diane are making the kool-aid for the rest of those who are willing to drink it. If you ever had the time to really see what is going on in our schools you would find that quality, competent and caring leadership is where you must start. Than give a classroom to each teacher and reduce class size to what the building is designed for and to what is closer to teacher student ratios i private schools. From there you can start building quality schools for all kids. The charter school model leaves too many on the outside, skims the better students from the more solid families in any neighborhood, and divides communities. Let discuss issues rather than attack the messenger, that is too easy.
Tom,
At Success we have around 80% of the age eligible kids in Central Harlem applying to our schools. Our schools have 14-20% sped populations, 80-90% Title I, percentages of homeless and foster kids similar to the schools we co-locate with, etc. We are delivering results with large classes (most have 30 kids to one teacher) and proving every day that poverty, while awful and pervasive, is not an obstacle to education. In fact, a great education is often poor kids’ best chance to overcome poverty.
You want to talk about issues, I’m happy to engage.
Best,
Gideon
Thanks, Robert. I have a singular advantage. I can’t be fired and I don’t want a grant from a foundation.
Gideon, at my school we have about the same SPED population you have, but we can’t turn anyone away. We have higher minority and higher poverty populations than you have. We get better results than all our neighboring charter schools. One of our key problems is kids from charter schools coming back, literally without warning.
If you can’t do better than you’re doing, you don’t deserve any better. We’re doing your job at a fraction of your cost. Why can’t I take some of your money away to pay for what we do at our public school? Why is it that those of us who compete better, can’t get paid for it?
Gideon is a business man, founder of MR Ventures, partner in Argyle LLC Real Estate that develops luxury properties, and more importantly is vice chairman of the board of the Success Charter Network. Clearly his comments are biased in my opinion.
I’m a businessman turned teacher; real estate counsel at American Airlines, regional real estate manager for Verizon Wireless. My comments are biased, too. Education is not business. Business is not education.
To improve education, we should raise teacher pay. Administrators and charter school executives who make more than teachers might be regarded as leaks in the system, draining away the resources that our children need applied in other ways — like raising the pay of public school teachers.
Thank you for honesty. I obviously with everything you said.
Success Academies is now pushing into gentrified neighborhoods with excellent schools where they are not wanted. At public hearings, hundreds of parents turn out to oppose them. They get charters because of political connections, not because of parental demand.
Diane
Diane,
Sorry if this seemed like an insult…I merely meant that your comment on testing seemed more in line with your old statements than your newer beliefs.
“@gideonstein: @dianeravitch advocates for MORE money for testing. Starting to sound like old @NOTDianeRavitch. Cc: @leoniehaimson http://t.co/dOKCpYVb”
Best,
Gideon
Where the wealthy child of privilege Stein gets confused is his false dichotomy of an “old” versus “new” Professor Ravitch. What she is, and this will be hard for greed obsessed folks like Moskowitz, Barr, Burton, Canada, Young, Stein et al. to grasp, is an intelligent woman who changed here views based on evidence. On balance you (eg. Mr. Stein) plutocrats did a good job masking the right wing privatization project you espouse for many years. You even had people like Professor Ravitch onboard for a little while, but in the end your market based solutions are only solutions for profit, not pedagogy. All the real research (not Gates Foundation policy papers) has exposed the privatizers’ claims not only as false, but as exacerbating problems. Professor Ravitch was too sharp and too dedicated to the principles of pubic education to continue supporting failed ideologies.
Stein and his fellow reactionaries are universally despised in the neighborhoods they colonize. Here’s an excellent video showing how working class people react to his vile paternalism.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/03/speaking-truth-to-eva-moskovitz-and.html
[…] the rest Something Scary Happened Last Night […]
Dr. Ravitch thank you again for your continued leadership in the case to further quality education for ALL. Your battle should be titled “Diane vs. Goliath.” AskteacherZ will always be at your side and fight the good fight to the end.
In Dallas, new superintendent Mike Miles will make about $300,000. Dramatic increase from the under $200,000 Mike Hinojosa made — but to oversee more than 210 schools and 157,000 students, it makes it seem Dallas gets a bargain, compared to NY charter school execs who make 33% more than Miles, for overseeing 98% fewer buildings and students.
Does anybody know what goes on in education?
Ed, no one knows…and by the way, I know this would shock everyone, but as of yet, no mention of the story on the NY Post website.
From looking at how you made your money in real estate, it looks like you have been part of the gentrification of Northern Manhattan. Success Charter Schools fits right in as the complexion of the neighborhoods change and the rising costs of property value. Not for profit does not eliminate greed, ask Eva. Until I see an independent evaluation of any charter school, any reference to data or numbers is suspect.
Tom,
Not sure what happened to my post about our results, so I’ll repost. At Success, our kids (from 3rd grade on) take the NYS high stakes tests…same ones that all NYC public school kids as well as kids in other cities and towns throughout NYS take. Our performance ranks in the top 1% of the state and we have populations that mirror the district schools right around us. We have higher student retention rates that most of our co-located district schools so saying we purge kids is just not true. We actually run excellent schools.
As for others points on teacher salaries, I agree, we pay up to 20%+ above comparable DOE salaries.
Best,
Gideon
Are you running a control group? Of course not. Your results — all of them — can be explained thoroughly by the Hawthorne Effect. There’s nothing wrong with improving stuff solely by Hawthorne Effect, to my mind — so long as the intervention, worthless as an intervention otherwise, costs nothing and takes nothing at all from productive efforts elsewhere in the organization.
However, you operate a charter school. If it operates in NYC as in the rest of the nation, that means you’re stealing resources from public schools, where the same effects could be obtained at a much lower cost.
But there are other problems with your numbers, too. The chief problem remains that your school functions solely by cannibalism, by amputation, by shackling the resources of public schools. If you brought new money in, I’d not complain.
But you do, after all, run a charter school, right?
Preselection bias. If you let me select the best kids from each population, I can get into the 99.9 percentile. You’re only in the 99th?
Now, if you were selecting kids at random, you’d have great stuff to brag about. I know of no charter school that picks kids at random.
So, again, you’re skimming the cream of the students, and you’re taking resources from the non-cream kids.
In that case, when you get the best players and you get to shackle the competition, if you don’t succeed at a much, much higher rate, you’re completely incompetent.
But tell me about those teachers in the public schools, the teachers you leave behind to teach the kids you leave behind. When they get results equal to or better than yours, what reward do they get? To do that, they have to perform at a level many times better than yours — dealing with kids you reject, with a fraction of the resources they had before. Those teachers are heroes.
Other than a boot in the rear, what do they get?
Once you pick the more successful kids, you’d better have a much higher retention rate. Of course, there is no comparison group, no control group, to see what the public schools in your area get. At my school we get a retention rate that doesn’t really mean anything. Students line up literally until the last two weeks of school to get in, from other public schools and from local charter schools (some of which have kicked these kids out — in Texas, that doesn’t count against their retention rate; though, if they kick a kid out and he fails to re-enroll, it can count against our graduation rate. Go figure.)
Pre-selection bias. No control group.
I get your results with your rejects. I get your results with the kids just out of jail. Some of my students who scored commended on the state tests did so after spending a few weeks in jail awaiting trial for robbery, one as a material witness to murder (after he got out of the hospital himself).
Do you even accept those kids in your school?
So, then, you support raising pay for public school teachers? You’re arguing here that you’re just doing a better job with kids, though you don’t do anything really different . . . that doesn’t wash.
What do you do in classes with 30 to 40 students to get them to succeed beyond your neighboring public schools? What’s your process to get up-to-speed the kid who just got out of jail, or the kid who worked all night to feed his four younger siblings because he is the sole support for the family? What do you do when the district calls and says there’s no more paper to make tests with, in April? Do you require your teachers to provide their own computers, classroom telephones, and sometimes textbooks — as teachers must in much of Texas and California?
On the bottom line, I simply do not grant credence to a claim that you perform better with the same kids. You don’t get the same kids, you probably don’t allow the same kids in.
If you’ve got a study with a valid control that suggests your results come from improvements in education, and not solely from the Hawthorne Effect or preselection bias, or both together, I’d love to see it. No such study existed when I worked education policy at the U.S. Senate, I couldn’t find one to publish when I did that for the Department of Education, and I haven’t seen one in the years since.
It’s good students in New York City can succeed as well as your students do. I don’t see justification for cannibalizing the education of the other kids to make that happen, however. If you’ve got a program that works, put it in the public schools. Propose to the union to raise salaries by 20% across the board and make other changes to treat them as essential frontline workers, you’ll find the union teachers much more effective than any other group — they got into the business to be successful teachers, after all, and if something has intervened to change that path, it’s not their fault.
I commend you for making your students take the tests everyone else takes — that’s not required of most charter schools in the country. We lose 8 weeks a year out of our calendar to testing, though, and I’ll wager you don’t.
We still get results comparable to yours. When do you come tout our work as the model to follow?
Interesting research. I don’t know whether the authors claim that it controls for the Hawthorne Effect, but of course it does not. The comparison controls slightly for a pre-selection bias. But unless the kids rejected were put in a different program and told they had been made among the elect, there is no control at all for Hawthorne Effect.
As you know, the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric provided the original site of the research. Employees were consulted on changes to be made in the workplace to improve productivity. Researchers eventually wondered why everything they did goosed productivity. So they did the same consultations, but reversed the earlier changes. Productivity still rose.
In Hoxby’s study, there was a comparison made with “workers” whose suggestions were rejected, whose “workplaces” did not change.
But that’s not the same thing.
It’s a start, but it’s far from evidence that all your good results are not the result of preselection bias and Hawthorne Effect.
I’m still curious: Is your lottery open to kids out of jail, or with serious attendance problems, or other behavioral issues?
Ed,
Hoxby controls entirely for selection bias. Say only the top 1% apply to charter lotteries…by examining results of lotteried in vs. lotteried out, you’re controlling for any pre-selection. As for Hawthorne, if all the kids at all public district and public charter schools throughout NYS take the same high stakes tests, aren’t they all subject to the Hawthorne effect? They are all being tested and with the same tests. As you well known, Hawthorne isn’t without significant controversy and Hoxby really obviates any potential Hawthorne effect by examining test results across schools (again both district and charter) while controlling for selection bias.
Best,
Gideon
Hawthorne Effect deals with the treatment prior to the test, not the test itself. No, you can’t eliminate the Hawthorne effect with a reject population as a control — that rather cements the effect into place.
There’s no pre-selection bias? You say that, but I keep looking for the evidence that you take all comers. I know you don’t — there’s a lottery process. And I’ll wager that people have to apply for the lottery, yes?
Other than that, you take “behavioral problems,” too? You’re the only charter program in America who does, if so.
One group goes to a school with greater resources, smaller class size, and small numbers of kids who struggle with language and disability. One group goes to a school that kicks out low performers. The other group goes to overcrowded, under-resourced neighborhood public schools.
No bias? Same schools? Same kids? Peer effects. Inequality of opportunity.
Diane
Yeah, those would explain the differences. One of the studies I published at Education was the one that clearly showed class size makes a difference. When class size drops to 18, there are modest by significant gains regardless what else is not changed in the classes. When class size drops to 15, the gains are almost monumental.
So when I have a class of 34 students, we should expect them to regress, no?
If what you say is accurate, Dr. Ravitch, then we might suspect the reasons Mr. Stein does not tout those as advantages for his charter schools. The only way charters get there is by taking the money from public schools.
Hoxby’s study should correlate will with other studies that show that students in smaller classes, with adequate resources and a competent teacher, in the public schools, has a much greater chance of graduating high school and proceeding to college.
If those are the circumstances, then we are left without any evidence that charter schools, simply by being charters, provide any magic performance enhancements. Give me a smaller class, competent and quick intervention for language difficulties (including just a general inability to read), and give us the power to remove extremely disruptive students (I’ve been told we “can’t burden the disciplinary process”), and I’ll give you championship performance, too.
But in my classroom, we already get great performance on the state tests, with crowds of kids, inadequate texts, inadequate teaching materials, and disruptive students. Why can’t the charters do at least as well?
I have seen enough statistics to counter your arguments about Success Academies. I also know the close relationship your leadership and your board have with Bloomberg and the DOE elite have stacked the deck to keep pushing a quasi private system of education. Do students get “pushed” out? Do you serve special needs and English language learners at the same rate and level and community schools? Mirroring school districts does not preclude a lottery, interview and selection system which skims from the more motivated families who are likely to follow through with the process.
I really do not understand how you try to divert the attention from your potential conflict of interest with Diane’s financial situation. Speaking fees, are you kidding me. Diane is advocating for a public school system which serves all the children. Your model includes creating the facade of “success” while interested parities get rich off public school funds. Go ahead and feel like you are doing something for the under served if that makes you feel better but those of us in the trenches know better.
Tom, I told you I had blocked this guy on Twitter because of his insulting comments. He can’t help himself. He goes dirty at the first opportunity. I don’t like that, and I won’t have it on my blog, just as I won’t tolerate it on Twitter.
Diane
Diane,
You try to discredit people by saying they are hedge fund mangers, work for foundations or have money. It’s not “dirty” to point out you haave money and how you got it…you brought it up yourself in a public forum.
I’m happy to stick to discussing education, I wasn’t the one to call me a “hedge fund manager.” You started that…
Gideon
Gideon, get off your high horse and come teach. I can tell you how to run your business, but you won’t listen to me so long as I’m a teacher. I don’t have a right to start up a [whatever your business is] next door to you, and have the state take money out of your till to finance my effort.
We worked on reforming the ERIC system and a bunch of other stuff while I worked at ED. At every place I spoke, teachers came to me and said I didn’t have the full picture until I tried to make it work in a classroom, today.
They were being polite. It’s much worse than they painted it, then, and I suspect it was much worse, then, too.
Quit your job, sign up to teach with your methods in a public school.
On education, we should all be from Missouri. Show us. Charter schools don’t do that.
Wow..
“Folks I trust you’ve all seen the UFT paper and am interested in your reactions (in part because Duncan’s speech writer wants to know what I think).
– Nelson Smith, president and CEO, national alliance for public charter schools”
Your tax dollars at work.
Text to text connection: this post reminds me of Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew, in which he documents the growth (throughout the post-Regan decades) of the neoliberal agenda via the placement of appointees who were/are antagonistic to the various gov’t agencies they were presumed to advocate for, thus opening doors for privatization and deregulation. Like making Hank Paulson sect’y of the treasury for just one example. Seems a tried and true strategy now being applied wholesale to public education. Manufacture a crisis and then privatize from within.
BTW, Happy Mother’s Day, Diane!
Wow..
“Folks I trust you’ve all seen the UFT paper and am interested in your reactions (in part because Duncan’s speech writer wants to know what I think).
– Nelson Smith, president and CEO, national alliance for public charter schools”
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 […]